Will the president and Congress reach a grand bargain? If so, when, and will it include tax rate hikes on the wealthy? Remember all answers must be in by 6 p.m. ET.

Call it a metaphor. The Romney team held a hastily arranged 2 p.m. conference call for some conservative new-media journalists. By 2 p.m., no call in number had been provided. To the bitter end, the logistics seem too much for them to handle.

Once the call finally started, Matt Rhodes, who remained hidden from view throughout the campaign, praised Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), whom he said “has a very bright future. He will be a leader in the Republicans Party and the conservative movement.” He acknowledged, “We made our share of mistakes.” He then passed the baton to others.

Pollster Neil Newhouse, whose internal polls were premised on an electorate that was D +2 or 3 rather than D +6 (leaving the candidate and the rest of the campaign stunned when Romney-Ryan lost) acknowledged that the Obama team did its job targeting 18- to 29-year-olds, whose percentage of the electorate went up, Hispanics and African Americans. For example, the Obama team surprised the Romney team by increasing the percentage of African American voters in Ohio by 160,000 votes from 2008, well in excess of the margin of victory.

It is the summer of 2011 all over again. In January we will have President Obama in the White House, a Republican-controlled majority and a Democratic majority in the Senate with many red state Democrats up for reelection in the next cycle. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) is open to tax reform that generates more revenue but not rate increases. The president goes in front of the press to say he is open to a compromise and wants the rich to pay a little more but stops short of insisting on a rate hike.

Today The Post reports on the president’s appearance:

“I’m open to compromise. I’m open to new ideas. I’m committed to solving our fiscal challenges,” Obama said. But he held the line on raising taxes on the wealthy.

“We can’t just cut our way to prosperity,” Obama said. “If we’re serious about reducing the deficit, we have to combine spending cuts with revenue, and that means asking the wealthiest Americans to pay a little more in taxes.” . . .

Republicans say they are willing to entertain new tax revenue but will not allow rates to rise on upper-income earners, as is scheduled to happen at the end of the year. Notably, Obama did not say rates must rise on upper-income Americans — only that they must pay more in taxes — leaving room for a potential compromise.

This is precisely where we were about 15 months ago when the grand bargain on precisely these terms broke down. It may shock dim reporters or confuse Democratic spinners, but this is nothing new. The only thing that has changed is that the president has the experience of seeing a grand bargain of historic proportions slip through his grasp. He and Boehner know precisely where the deal is to be had — where they were when Obama upped the ante on taxes and the grand bargain crumbled.

The political alignment is not unlike what it was in 2011. The president and Boehner want a deal. Senate Democrats from red states who will face voters in 2014 don’t want to send the country over the fiscal cliff or be tagged as tax hikers. Senate House members and safe blue state Senate Democrats would just as soon demand a tax rate hike, let the country go over the cliff and blame Republicans. What is different today, however, is that the president really has no interest in getting pushed around by unrealistic liberals in his party. They might have to stand for reelection, but he doesn’t and it must pain him to realize the grand bargain got away last time.

Unlike domestic policy, Congress has a limited role to play in foreign policy. The power of the purse is key, as are oversight and confirmation hearings, but the president is essentially in the driver’s seat when it comes to national security.

In the Obama administration there is no more essential task than in working to make the administration more transparent about its missteps and more definitive about its policy choices.

In what seems like a movie plot, we learn the Iranians a week before the election took a shot at a U.S. drone, a fact withheld from the public until after the election. The New York Times reports: “Iranian warplanes shot at an American military surveillance drone flying over the Persian Gulf near Iran last week, Pentagon officials disclosed Thursday. They said that the aircraft, a Predator drone, was flying in international airspace and was not hit and that the episode had prompted a strong protest to the Iranian government. The shooting, which involved two Russian-made Su-25 jets known as Frogfoots, occurred on Nov. 1 and was the first known instance of Iranian warplanes firing on an American surveillance drone.” Even the Times concedes the problem here:

[T]he failure to disclose a hostile encounter with Iran’s military at a time of increased international tensions over the disputed Iranian nuclear program — and five days before the American presidential election — raises questions for the Obama administration. Had the Iranian attack been disclosed before Election Day, it is likely to have been viewed in a political context — interpreted either as sign of the administration’s weakness or, conversely, as an opportunity for President Obama to demonstrate leadership.

Cliff May of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies calls the Iranian move “a provocative act, a stick in the eye.” May notes it is a test of sorts, an effort to see if President Obama is desperate for a deal on nuclear weapons development. Will he put the brakes on widely reported secret talks? “If not, he wants the negotiations more than they do – that kind of thing is helpful to know and to reinforce,” May cautions. He adds: “Killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, plotting terrorism right in the U.S. capital – they [the Iranians] like to remind themselves, us and the world that they can do these things with impunity.”

Coupled with the closed-door reviews of the Benghazi debacle and the obsessive leaking of national security secrets, the nondisclosure of the drone attack highlights the degree to which the administration is attempting to manage national security under a veil of secrecy, phony executive and national security privileges and out-and-out dissembling. In an election year in which the mainstream media were too often rooting for rather than confronting the administration, Obama got away with this behavior. Will the press continue to shrug its shoulders or will it expend the same resources and energy it did in bird-dogging the Bush administration?

That task, I suspect, will fall largely to the House oversight committees, GOP questioners in Senate confirmation hearings and the conservative media.

The math is not there in presidential elections. The GOP will not regain the White House unless and until it gets a greater share of votes in huge turnout elections from non-white voters. When the white segment of the electorate is 72 percent (as it was in 2012), Republicans can’t win in enough states doing as poorly as they have been doing with other ethnic and racial groups. That necessitates refinement in messaging, improved and diverse candidate selection, and the ability to navigate the language barrier for multiple groups. But there is simply no way to begin the conversation without immigration reform.

So long as Republicans talk about “self-deportation” and refuse to acknowledge that we will never round up 11 million or so illegal immigrants, Republicans will not begin to make inroads with Hispanics or other minority groups, including Asian Americans. The GOP should be the party of legal immigration, upward mobility and assimilation if it wants to be the party of economic freedom and a majority party.

To my surprise, key players in the GOP now seem to understand this. House Speaker John Boehner, fresh from jump-starting grand-bargain talks, also made the first move on immigration reform. The Hill reports:

This issue has been around far too long,” Boehner said in the ABC interview. “A comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.”

Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Senate Immigration, Refugees and Border Security Subcommittee, called Boehner’s comments a “breakthrough.”

“Democrats in the Senate look forward to working with him to come up with a bipartisan solution,” Schumer said in a statement

The president has said that immigration reform would be a top priority if he were elected to a second term.