Why Obama can't entirely channel Bill Clinton circa 1995

Worried by the Obama administration's apparent large concessions to date in the debt ceiling negotiations (demanding paltry revenue hikes in exchange for massive spending cuts), I've been reading newspaper chronicles of Bill Clinton's epic budget battles with the Republican House and Senate in 1995 and 1996, seeking a kind of benchmark and maybe a bit of reassurance.

Clinton pretty much won these battles, which were not really resolved until the Balanced Budget Act was agreed upon in August 1997. The $284 billion in Medicare cuts over seven years that the Republicans had written into their 1996 bills was winnowed down to $112 billion; the GOP's $182 billion in Medicaid cuts was reduced to a fraction of that and offset by $24 billion for the S-CHIP program to provide Medicaid to uninsured children; the $245 billion in tax cuts became $95 billion in cuts reflecting Clinton's priorities.