There is a very simple negotiating tactic that Obama needs to learn - and fast. It's called "the broken record". (Note this assumes one remembers a time before digital, a time of vinyl records). Remember when a scratch on the record meant that the same small part of the song got played over and over and over again.
I first became conscious of this approach when I was travelling in Asia. It was often employed by Chinese government employees when they did not want you to have something, like a room in their hotel (less work if fewer customers). They would simply repeat the same mantra over and over - "there is no room" or "Mr. Hu is not in today". Confronted with obvious evidence to the contrary (eg: Mr. Hu walking by behind them) they would simply stick to the same "Mr. Hu is not here today".
(As an aside one of the best examples of ignoring reality comes from the book "Iron and Silk", where the author, a foreign teacher in China, after having killed a rat in his class is told by his students to go to the government office with the dead rat to collect 10 cents for killing it. But at the government office they refused to pay him saying that "there are no rats in China" (the official government propaganda at the time given to foreigners) despite his holding the dead rat by the tail in front of them.)
It was enough to drive most foreigners to distraction - which seemed to be the intent as "losing one's temper" was a severe loss of face in Chinese eyes ... and foreigners could be made to lose it quite easily.
Then one day I saw the technique flipped around and watched a foreigner try it on a Chinese boss. He had gotten tired of being continually pressured into taking assignments he did not want so he decided to just kept repeating the same "I will not teach that class" over and over. Eventually for a change it was the Chinese boss that lost it. Ah-hah!