A turning point in the Obama presidency?

In the aftermath of John Boehner’s decision to put the nation’s economy at further risk with his refusal to negotiate any further with President Obama, Virginia smacks a 2008 Democratic party leader in the head and exclaims, “You could’ve had a Clinton!”

In the meantime, Howard Kurtz at the Daily Beast is speculating that the hope and change artist from 08 maybe, just maybe, has had enough:

As debt talks hit the skids yet again, the Great Compromiser seemed to finally lose his cool—has he reached his breaking point?

There was a moment—after he appealed for reason, blamed the Republicans, recited the numbers, invoked Ronald Reagan—that President Obama seemed filled with fervor.

He was not going to be party to “driving a bunch of poor kids off the Medicaid rolls,” or penalizing the “working stiffs out there,” the people who “don’t have lobbyists.”

These are standard Democratic talking points, to be sure, but when you strip everything else away, when you try to locate the remnants of the audacity of hope, this is why Obama thinks he ran for president.

As he announced the collapse of the debt negotiations Friday evening after House Speaker John Boehner pulled the plug, Obama appeared to offer an answer to those, many of them in his own party, who wonder: Does he have a breaking point?

To some diehard Democrats, Obama always seems willing to meet the opposition more than halfway in the service of getting a deal done. He put their sacred programs, Medicare and Social Security, on the table without securing a Republican commitment to raise a dollar in taxes. His own partisans weren’t clear whether he had a line in the sand that he would refuse to cross.

Read more: