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Obama offers House Speaker Boehner a birthday drink in bid to avert ‘fiscal cliff’

DIVINE: President Obama extends “birthday greetings, bottle of wine” to House Speaker John Boehner at the White House yesterday. (
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WASHINGTON — Don’t drink and tax!

President Obama tried to take the edge off the start of negotiations over the fiscal cliff, presenting a fine bottle of Tuscan wine to his negotiating adversary, House Speaker John Boehner.

The 1997 bottle of Altero Brunello di Montalcino goes for about $125 in DC stores and is certain to be well received by Boehner (R-Ohio), who enjoys a glass of wine and a smoke and grew up working in his dad’s bar.

The birthday gift may violate the House ban on gifts of more than $50 to members of Congress. There is an exception for gifts from friends, so the bottle of sangiovese could qualify.

But it may be worth the cost and the risk, given how far Democrats and Republicans remain on taxes and spending cuts.

Obama also got chummy with Boehner — a one-time golf companion whom he couldn’t make a budget deal with last year — in his opening remarks at a bipartisan powwow at the White House, wishing the speaker a happy birthday while the cameras rolled.

“We’re not going to embarrass him with a cake, because we didn’t know how many candles were needed,” Obama quipped.

“Yeah, right,” cracked Boehner, who turns 63 today.

Obama and Congress are trying to avoid the fiscal cliff — a toxic combination of $700 billion in across-the-board tax hikes and spending cuts that go into effect in January unless the parties reach a revised deficit-reduction deal.

Obama said he wanted to make sure “taxes don’t go up on middle-class families . . . So my hope is that this is going to be the beginning of a fruitful process where we’re able to come to an agreement that will reduce our deficit in a balanced way.”

Afterward, lawmakers sounded optimistic, given how the two parties have already started clashing over tax rates for the wealthy. Obama wants to increase them; Republicans don’t.

“We are prepared to put revenue on the table, provided we fix the real problem,” Senate GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

But he added: “Most of my members I think without exception believe that we’re in the dilemma we’re in not because we taxed too little but because we spent too much.”

“I believe that we can do this and avert this fiscal cliff,” said Boehner.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi specifically mentioned the importance of sending a “message of confidence” to the financial markets – which have tanked since Obama’s re-election amid signs that a deal will be hard to reach.