OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

The Recovery Act - the economic stimulus law that blunted the recession - only passed after Obama accepted the demand from three Senate Republicans to reduce the size of the package by about $100 billion, mostly by paring back spending proposals. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform bill also squeaked through the Senate with three Republican votes. Obama sealed the deal after making a key concession to newly elected Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown, scrapping an outright ban on commercial banks investing in high-risk funds in favor of allowing limited investments.

In his second term, Obama withstood the civil libertarian outcry that followed the Edward Snowden leaks and shaped a bipartisan surveillance reform law - supported by more than three out of every four House Republicans -- that made some small concessions to privacy advocates without hindering the National Security Agency's core counter-terrorism work. [...]

Finally, there are two particularly consequential acts of bipartisanship that are poorly understood. One is the 2010 tax cut deal.

Obama was accused of capitulation when, after the 2010 midterms in which Republicans claimed the House, he agreed to extend George W. Bush's signature tax cut law, which was due to expire, for two more years. In exchange, Republicans accepted a temporary extension for long-term unemployment insurance and a one-year payroll tax cut. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman claimed it was a recipe to make the Bush tax cuts permanent: "if Democrats give in to the blackmailers now, they'll just face more demands in the future." Bernie Sanders famously seized the Senate floor for eight hours in a desperate attempt to derail the compromise. Then in his own presidential bid, he criticized Obama for trying to be "reasonable" with Republicans.

But Obama wisely played the long game. He didn't have the votes to repeal the tax cuts in 2010, before or after the midterms (vulnerable Democrats on the ballot in 2010 were nervous about forcing the issue before Election Day). So he punted until the end of 2012 when, if he won re-election, he would regain the whip hand.

And the agreement was critical to winning that re-election. The extension of tax cuts and unemployment benefits amounted to about $300 billion of additional economic stimulus. In 2012, GDP growth in the first and second quarters, the quarters that election modelers believe have the greatest impact on the presidential outcome, were a middling 2.0 and 1.3 percent, respectively. Without extra stimulus, the economy could have stalled out or tipped back into recession just before the election, destroying Obama's chances.

Instead, Obama became first Democrat to win consecutive popular vote majorities since FDR. And his first order of business was to finish what he started two years prior.

He dispatched Vice President Joe Biden to hash out an agreement with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (despite Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's desire to hold out for more). The final deal, largely repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, created a tax code that the New York Times said could be "by some measures ... the most progressive in a generation." And nearly every Senate Republican, and one-third of House Republicans, voted for it.

The other underappreciated bipartisan success is one that neither party likes to talk about: the across-the-board budget cuts known as "the sequester."

The sequester happened as an outgrowth of a 2011 budget deal signed after House Republicans threatened to force an economically dangerous default on the national debt unless spending was deeply cut. Obama and then-Speaker John Boehner tried to work out a "grand bargain" - involving changes to entitlement programs and the tax code -- to resolve the impasse, but failed. The finger-pointing on both sides remains to this day.

What was agreed upon was the "super-committee" - a bipartisan task force designed to come up with a deficit reduction plan worth $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Otherwise, the sequester would chop domestic and military spending equally to achieve a similar result. In other words, the deficit would be shrunk, either the easy way or the hard way.

They did it the hard way. The super-committee was gridlocked. The sequester came down. And the budget was cut. While a subsequent 2013 budget deal somewhat loosened the sequester caps, the trajectory of the annual budget deficit is sharply down from the days of the stimulus: from 9.8 percent of the gross domestic product in 2009 to 3.2 percent in 2016. That's the exact number (after rounding down) Obama set in 2010 as his ultimate goal.

Obama will take credit for the statistic, but he, like everyone else in Washington, ran as far from the sequester as possible. No one wanted to admit that both parties came together to design the mechanism for ham-fisted cuts that made so many constituencies squeal.

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