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Why Obama's having dinner with Republicans

NBC News grabs a key detail from the dinner President Obama held with 12 Senate Republicans last night:     It was serious. It was respectful. And it was informative. (In fact, one senator told us that he learned, for the first time, the actual cuts that the president has put on the table. Leadership hadn’t shared that list with them before). The number of Republicans who don’t know what the White House is actually offering is stunning. Last week I wrote about a Republican legislator who didn’t know Obama had publicly said he’d be willing to move to chained-CPI.     Would it matter, one reporter asked the veteran legislator, if the president were to put chained-CPI — a policy that reconfigures the way the government measures inflation and thus slows the growth of Social Security benefits — on the table?     “Absolutely,” the legislator said. “That’s serious.”     Another reporter jumped in. “But it is on the table! They tell us three times a day that they want to do chained-CPI.”