And, yeah, maybe that's even true. But we all have a role to play in this little dance, and my role, when horrible things are proposed, is to scream and shout about how horrible they are to a) minutely decrease probability of it happening and b) helping to make sure if there is some "grand bargain" involved it isn't complete shit.
I'm not totally unfamiliar with various people in the White House. As Brian Beutler writes
One of the White House’s most poorly kept secrets is that many of Obama’s economic advisers support Chained CPI on the merits, or believe it to be the least-bad benefit cut Obama could offer Republicans
Why would they support it on the merits? Either they're just totally bad people, angling for Very Serious People seats in the Village, or they're wedded to the notion that somehow it makes sense for Dems to cut Social Security in a slightly less horrible way than Republicans instead of, you know, making the case that an extremely popular program just doesn't need to be cut and maximizing the political backlash against the bad guys who would try. In any case, there were genuine supporters of a horrible idea, people who would have supported doing it without a bargain.