It is not the GOP or the Tea Party; it is progressives within his own party. It is you Dkos member.
Obama employs all the hard line negotiation tactics employed by Bushco like my way or the highway, artificial crisis creation, threats of impending disaster, lines in the sand, etc. He just employs them against his progressive supporters. When Obama meets with Boehner and McConnell he is not negotiating, he is caucusing. Plotting strategy as to how to negotiate what is very much a common agenda to cut "entitlements" through a the other GOP as negotiations, one should understand these meetings as caucusing among parties with a common agenda: cutting "entitlements."
It was not the GOP who put cuts to Medicare and SS on the caucusing table, it was, as Congressman Conyers has noted, the President. These front page negotiations have not been between Obama and the GOP, they have been between Obama and progressives. The man is probing continually to see how much of a GOP agenda his supporters will tolerate. He has done that since Jan 20, 2009. He did it with HCR, extension of Bush tax cuts, continuation of Bush's wars and national surveillance state, drilling in the Gulf, and on and on.
Obama is a masterful negotiator and manipulator who gets almost all of what he wants from his negotiating counterparty. Once you appreciate the true identity of Obama's counterparty, you realize he is not a spineless mound of jello, he is as hard line as it gets. Obama will employ every negotiating tactic in the book against the parties that most stands in the way of what he is working to accomplish: progressives. From Obama's perspective, you have nowhere else to go, no choice. And he takes full advantage.