Who won? Who lost?

I am amazed when I look at the things being written about the recent shenanigans over the budget. On the one hand, there are people like the editors of The Nation, who wrote an editorial dated October 16, 2013, entitled “Even When the GOP Loses, It Wins,” whose thesis is that it was in fact a Republican victory because:

The GOP now goes into budget talks with sequestration as the new baseline, primed to demand longer-term cuts in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. And they still hold the gun of a US default to the nation’s head in the next debt ceiling showdown.

But on the other hand, Obamacare is still in place, and we read such things as Timothy Noah's posting on MSNBC's site:

[W]hat the GOP’s right flank is experiencing right now, in government and the court of political opinion, is failure.

Both these posts come from the political Left, so it is not a case of the Left seeing it as a Right win because they had to give up some and the Right seeing a mirror image of this. It is clear that John Boehner feels that he lost:

“We fought the good fight. We just didn't win,” Boehner told Cincinnati radio station WLW on Wednesday after the Senate stepped in to effectively end the legislative impasse.…“Every time I've gotten into a discussion with the President, the Vice President, the Democrats here in Washington, and talk about entitlement changes, trying to make these programs sustainable, all they want to do is raise taxes. Well we can't do that,” Boehner said.

“If they're going to hold onto their position that we're always going to raise taxes, then we're not going to come to an agreement.”

As I said in a previous post, they just kicked the can down the road. Who will come out ahead in the long run, I just don't know.