Who's fault was the near default? Or, the Gambling House's advantage.

This is how I see it, it was both Obama's and the House's fault, but primarily Obama's. It was not because of his having bad policies in the matter, but in his having very poor negotiation skills.

Obama held the debt ceiling limit negotiations to some extent for no reason, because he gave in almost completely to Boehner anyway. If he was going to do that, he shouldn't have contributed to making the crisis happen and should have gave in to Boehner at the beginning before it reached a crisis point, as the Speaker had offered him a similar deal to what we wound up with, minus some tea party stuff, earlier anyway - and he could have taken it with weeks to go.

Of course, the House could have given in to the President's demands, and likewise not delayed the debt ceiling limit, but why should they, when he was going to give in anyway?

Hindsight is 20-20, but if Obama wasn't, unlike Clinton with his government shutdown, actually willing to call the House's bluff, he shouldn't have gone to the gambling House in the first place.  He should have instead chosen to surrender - on much better terms, at an earlier stage of the process.

Instead he held out for  a "balanced package" that would never materialize for him and the Senate Democrat's slim majority he had behind it, which ended up causing the essentially wasted brinksmanship on the part of Obama, and the "gambling" House (gambling that Obama wouldn't, unlike Clinton, call their bluff) that led to the markets getting nervous.

It was the House's fault too, for also playing (successfully) at brinksmanship, but Obama chose to play politics when he didn't have a winning hand, he had the opportunity to do otherwise. Again, Boehnor and McConnell essentially got the same thing they offered earlier, plus even more concessions then they'd asked for, because the closer it got to the brink, the more sway the tea party got.

It would have been better for Obama, and even for the Democrats though perhaps politically they wouldn't have liked him giving in earlier, if he hadn't insisted on "not taking yes for an answer", as Boehnor somewhat cynically and inaccurately but on the whole correctly put it. (He ended up taking Boehnor's "yes" offer in the end anyway.)

He should have not tried to do the balanced approach thing - arguing over what, about 80 billion dollars annually (what 800 billion in cuts over a 10 year period means, not counting the smaller portion which is up to a committee that regardless of its composition will come up with smoke and mirrors for the remainder) - which is chump change on the Federal trillion-dollar annual level (that's thousands of billions, to put it in perspective, or tens of thousands of billions over a ten year period), but instead jeopardizing the faith people had in that trillion-dollar spending over whether there should be 10%, in the House plan that passed, or only slightly more of the budget, in Obama's failed proposals that included the admittedly balanced but unpassable taxation, cut over a ten year period! He, and the House, were playing high stakes poker for what in reality was low-stakes budget cuts.

Essentially, if you don't have a spine, and Obama didn't, you shouldn't play games with people who apparently did. Instead you should do what you did at the end, at the very start, quietly before the papers had gotten too excited, and saved everyone a lot of grief.

Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ;-)