WASHINGTON – Top House Republicans said they pressured President Obama on Wednesday for more leadership and a detailed plan on budget cuts, with one leading lawmaker accusing him of mischaracterizing a GOP Medicare proposal at the center of a partisan divide over spending.

The meeting at the White House came as the GOP sought to build pressure on Obama for trillions in spending cuts in exchange for any increase in the government’s ability to borrow. The White House had no immediate comment.

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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said he told President Obama at the meeting that “this is the window of opportunity where we can deal with this on our terms.” The Associated Press

After the meeting, dozens of rank-and-file GOP lawmakers streamed out of the front door of the White House and into a caravan of blue buses waiting for them on Pennsylvania Avenue, while members of the GOP leadership stopped on the driveway to speak to reporters and camera crews awaiting them.

“Any day Republicans and Democrats are actually having a dialogue, this is a good thing,” said Republican Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas.

Yet it was hard to see any concrete progress from a meeting that, based on a description by Republican lawmakers, amounted to a face-to-face accounting of each side’s positions, but no breakthrough on how to reach a debt-reduction deal. The talks came as Aug. 2 deadline approaches for the federal government to raise the debt limit or go into unprecedented default.

“Unfortunately, what we did not hear from the president is a specific plan of his to deal with the debt crisis,” Hensarling said. Instead, according to a GOP official briefed on the meeting, Obama noted that he has deputized Vice President Joe Biden to lead talks on deficit reduction.

According to the GOP official briefed on the meeting, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other leaders told Obama that he hadn’t put a specific plan for spending cuts on the table. They brought up a speech he gave at George Washington University in April in which he called for deficit reduction totaling $4 trillion through spending cuts, tax increases and other measures. The Republicans said a speech isn’t a plan.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said he explained his Medicare plan to the president to get him to stop mischaracterizing it. Obama and Democrats routinely label Ryan’s proposal a “voucher” plan that would undo Medicare as it is now known.

“We simply described to him precisely what it is we’ve been proposing,” Ryan said.

The session between Obama and House Republicans came on the heels of a symbolic and lopsided vote the day before against a GOP proposal to raise the cap on the debt limit by $2.4 trillion. The proposal, intended to prove that a bill to increase the borrowing cap with no spending cuts is dead on arrival, failed badly Tuesday on a 318-97 vote.

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