White House senior adviser David Plouffe has already begun backpedaling on President Obama's claim during the debate that sequestration will not happen.
"It will not happen," Obama said of the $1 trillion automatic budget cuts scheduled to go into effect in January, approximately half of which will be defense cuts.
"Everyone in Washington agrees the sequester should not happen," Plouffe said in the spin room following the debate -- rather than "will not happen."
Obama's own Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said the looming cuts would be "disastrous" and that he will "take whatever the hell they can make." The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, meanwhile, has said the cuts would result in a "hollow force."
Journalist Bob Woodward reported in his book "The Price of Politics," released earlier this year, that the idea of sequestration originated in the White House.