@Gerard
I am guessing that both parties involved are gambling heavily that after the 2012 elections they have a short time in which they control house and senate and can push through their agenda. This may be why they agreed with a deal that objectively speaking is not to their advantage.
And grassroots organisation is very very difficult. Throwing a bag of money at a problem and hire people to convince the voters is much easier. Grassroots is limited by two problems, the first being that few people are sufficiently activist to do more than mouthing plattitudes and stop well short of taking action. The second being that it is very difficult for any to escape out of the social circle it originated in. Few people bridge communities and as per problem one fewer still will be active enough to try to bring the grassroots movement over into another social group.

@erichwwk
There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to balance a budget during a crisis. Or at least trying to reduce the deficit. The difficult part is to do it in such a way that any action taken will not have the opposite effect. Keynesian spending sprees are easier to arrange but they too can make matters worse instead of better (e.g. spending 1.2 billion dollars on ‘quantitative easing’ has done nothing for the economy but instead is largely responsible for the current sad state of the budget, debt and deficit).
If you want to cut cost you must do it where it will not drain spending money out of the economy (which is what much of the planned cuts are going to do). If you raise taxes you must do it on luxury or excess income, not on the necessities (e.g. raising capital gains tax is a lot less damagaging than raising the value added tax).

But ultimately the real problem is that there are trillians of dollars being pushed around that are not real money but invented money by the banks(*). Draining that out of the economy again will be extremly painful and I do not see any politician willing to stand up for that until after the complete economic collapse when it really does not matter anymore.

(* thanks to fiat currency and fractional reserve banking, and the unfortunate deregulation which caused far too much of that created money to flow back into the rest of the economy till the point where it could not be untangled anymore and was taken for actual value instead of currency.
In our pursuit of more money we forgot what should be the First Law of Economy (as immutable in its way as the first law of thermodynamics): ‘In any closed econommic system the amount of risk can only stay the same or increase. It can never decrease’.
With that law in mind we could have avoided the subprime mortgage and repackaging bubble (and most other bubbles before I might add), and start prosecuting the perpetrators for fround instead of sort of accepting that they operated within the law while they first drained billions of dollar out of the economy for their own profit and then did it again with the public money that was intended to keep their banks upright in the face of the crisis they had caused themselves.