Today's Playbook Audio Briefing is presented by Facebook.

Good Friday morning. I'm Jake Sherman and welcome to your political playbook audio briefing.

And I'm Anna Palmer. There are lots of political calculations in legislative negotiations.

What to give away when, what to ask for, where to hold the meeting, and what aid to bring in tow, for example.

Perhaps nothing is more tricky than deciding when and how to walk away.

Ten meetings between Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,

White House Chief of Staff, Mark Meadows, and Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin,

over two weeks, have yielded

little more than bickering and resentment. At just before 8.30 Thursday night, after a three-hour

meeting, negotiators emerged to say they had made progress on small more items but remain

trillions of dollars apart on an overall package and still had no agreement on

the big items like enhanced unemployment insurance and state and local funding.

For now, there won't be another COVID relief bill and both sides will have to figure out

how to position themselves amid the rubble of what might be Congress's biggest swing and

miss in a decade.

Blame will fly. Pelosi and Schumer are already maligning Donald Trump and Republicans for,

in their explaining, not recognizing the scope of the problem. Indeed, Republican negotiators

pushed to pare back Democrats' aggressive demand, shrink the programs that were seeking to put

in place, and generally minimize the need for government intervention. But there was a middle ground, and therein lies the Democrats' own gamble.

They held hostage the main components of the bill in order to try to score a big package.

They only offered modest concessions. In this case, the White House's typical hyperbole,

Dems are intransient, will be largely true.

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