Ezra Klein has been optimistic about the prospects of a budget deal between President Obama and the Republicans. That is, until he realized that the latter group could and would always find some reason why they just couldn’t make a deal. In his weekend column Klein recounted an anecdote in which a Republican legislator told him that if President Obama would just offer up the idea of Chained-CPI (a new index for SocSec cost-of-living adjustments which would slow their growth) the legislator thought that could be the basis for a deal. Unfortunately, that offer has been on the table and on the White House website for some time now, yet the legislator didn’t know it was there. So Klein suggested if the parties would just talk to one another perhaps something could get done. Jonathan Chait advised Klein that that wouldn’t work.

If Obama could get hold of Klein’s mystery legislator and inform him of his budget offer, it almost certainly wouldn’t make a difference. He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.

And wouldn’t you know, Ezra then saw that exact scenario play out on Twitter with Mike Murphy, a Republican consultant and occasional columnist for Time magazine. Ezra even shows his work by embedding the tweets. Here’s his conclusion:

So let’s back up. Murphy’s initial view was that to unlock GOP votes for a budget deal, Obama just needed to endorse chained CPI and more means-testing in Medicare. Then it was pointed out that Obama has endorsed means-testing in Medicare, so Murphy wondered why he didn’t endorse chained CPI as part of a deal. Then it was pointed out that Obama did endorse chained CPI, at which point Murphy called chained CPI “a gimmick,” and said Obama had to endorse raising the Medicare age, drop his demands for more revenue as part of a deal and earn back the GOP’s trust.

Recall what Chait said would happen if the Republican legislator in my column was forced to react to the fact that Obama has endorsed chained CPI: “He would come up with something – the cuts aren’t real, or the taxes are awful, or they can’t trust Obama to carry them out, or something.” Check, check, and check.

Which is all to say that there’s no deal here. A few tweets later, Murphy gave his bottom-line view, which is that if Obama wants a deal, he needs to drop all of his demands and just agree to what the GOP wants to do.

Paul Krugman sees all this and nods in agreement:

The whole push for a Grand Bargain has been based on the notion that we can reach a fiscal deal that takes the whole fight over the budget off the table. What Klein has belatedly learned is how unlikely such a Bargain really is; but the same logic tells us that any Grand Bargain that might somehow be struck, via Obama’s mystical ability to mind-meld Star Trek and Star Wars or something, wouldn’t last. In a year — or more likely in a minute or two — Republicans would be back, demanding more tax cuts and more cuts in social programs. They just won’t take yes for an answer.

How’s that for a nice pleasant prophecy?

The Republican party really does need to be demolished as far as I’m concerned.