Democrats are prone to argue that they battled the president to a draw.
Democrats also stress that they resisted a bidding war with the president over tax cuts.
Unlike the congressional Democrats who retreated abjectly in the face of Ronald Reagan's tax-cutting zeal in 1981, this time they actually forced a Republican president to compromise. That was some display of Democratic moxie. But there is far more to the tax-cut debate than the figures in news headlines. This intentional vagueness carries with it both opportunity and danger. The potential is still there for Congress to craft a tax cut that sands down some of the unfairness in the Bush program, which disproportionately benefits wealthy taxpayers.