For both parties, the dispute has become a defining one as they hone campaign arguments heading toward November.
To the degree that any deal wins bipartisan support on slowing the growth of Medicare, for example, it would deprive Democrats of what has been one of their most potent arguments heading into 2012: their assertion that Republicans would gut the traditional Medicare system and leave older Americans vulnerable to rapidly rising health care costs.
At Tuesday's forum, organised by the National Association of Manufacturers, Pourbaix challenged the climate argument head-on.
I and others have made the case that many of Iraq's current troubles date back to the invasion itself; Blair confronts this argument head on.
Perhaps if McCain took the argument head-on, he could prove that we would actually get more oil from offshore drilling than we could save on the tires.
"She doesn't suffer fools, and she'll meet an argument head on," says Alan Little, a BBC reporter who met and befriended Sontag in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict.
Rather than confronting this argument head-on, which would involve publicly defending the actions of the banks, the insurers, and the industrial polluters, the right has settled on a strategy of trying to undermine the government through the courts, where its pro-corporate agenda can be repackaged as a defense of ancient freedoms.
Republican and Democratic candidates need to either enter the argument head on -- and somehow claim that 116 former senators, House members, governors and cabinet secretaries are wrong -- or they need to lay out what they will do to fix the mess.
With five minutes to go, an unquestionably legal goal settled the argument, Dalglish heading a Martin Buchan centre home.
