Steve Kornacki: Obama, George H.W. Bush, and the Ghosts of 1990

Steve Kornacki is Salon's news editor. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki

Let's stipulate that we don't know yet whether there will even a "grand bargain" deal between President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, much less what the precise details of any deal might look like.

But it's hard to ignore the fury that the latest reports, which suggest a compromise that would aim to produce $3 trillion in savings from spending cuts and only vague, conditional promises of new revenue in the future, are prompting from Democrats and activists and commentators on the left.

If Obama does end up pursuing something like this, he may be left relying on Republican votes to enact it, a situation that would call to mind one of the last suspenseful Washington showdown over deficits: The 1990 budget deal, in which President George H.W. Bush formally went back on his "No new taxes!" pledge and cut a sweeping deficit reduction deal with congressional Democrats. It ended up haunting Bush in varying ways for the rest of his presidency.

The '90 agreement was the product of more than six months of negotiations between Bush and a bipartisan group of congressional leaders. Deficits were soaring and Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress, demanded that any plan include a significant revenue component. Despite his '88 rhetoric, Bush had always been more of a pragmatist and was willing to go along, and so were Bob Dole and Bob Michel, the pragmatic conservatives who led the GOP in the Senate and House.