A Crisis of the President's Own Making -- By Kimberley A. Strassel, The Wall Street Journal

 Unless Mr. Obama is willing to make a serious deal on spending, he will spend the next three years fighting the same budget wars over and over.

For months now, the GOP has been held hostage by a faction of its party that deluded itself into believing President Obama might be rolled on his signature health-care law. Witness now an equally grand delusion on the Democratic side, one that President Obama nurtures at his peril.

According to Democrats, their steadfast refusal to negotiate on the government shutdown or the debt ceiling is rooted in a belief that now is the moment to "break" the GOP "fever." Democrats are furious that Republicans today use every Washington deadline to extract a spending concession—and insist they must be broken of that habit.

As New York Sen. Chuck Schumer put it on ABC's "This Week": If Democrats give in now to GOP demands, "it will lead to a future negotiation like that and a future one. If you go for this kind of hostage-taking once . . . it doesn't go away, it comes back worse and worse and worse."

Fact: The only thing that will make this "come back worse and worse" is a Democratic refusal to negotiate. Upon taking the House in 2010, Republicans made clear their top priority was getting the nation's spending and debt under control—a goal backed by the vast majority of the country—and they meant it. Time and again, they have asked the White House to work with them to reform the very entitlement programs that Mr. Obama has admitted are unsustainable and the primary drivers of debt.

Time and again, a spend-happy White House and Democrats have dug in, unwilling to buck liberal interest groups, refusing to touch Social Security or Medicare, mulishly granting only small spending concessions. Those were given only under duress, and only because the GOP threatened Armageddon in the 2011 debt-ceiling fight. Even then, the White House stubbornly refused to cede one dollar more than what was necessary to push another debt-ceiling round past the 2012 election.

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