Obama Officials Hold Early Budget Talks With Republicans Three senior White House officials, led by the chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, met with more than a dozen Senate Republicans on Thursday about prospects for bipartisan budget discussions. The meeting was following up on groundwork from President Obama's two recent dinners with some of the lawmakers. But both the White House and Senate participants were quick to advise against interpreting it as a sign of progress toward a grand bargain to stabilize the debt. Instead, it was described as an early step in a long process, with an end goal of both raising tax revenues and curbing the growth of spending for Medicare and other entitlement benefit programs. We're in a business where communicating is essential to getting to a bottom line somewhere down the line. So the fact that Denis McDonough was willing to sit down and the staff that was there was willing to sit down and go through their side of the budget story was important," said Senator Johnny Isakson, Republican of Georgia. And I think our willingness to sit down and listen and come back individually with suggestions is healthy. That's really the way things usually work. With Mr. McDonough was Rob Nabors, the deputy chief of staff and formerly Mr. Obama's chief liaison to Congress, and Miguel Rodriguez, who succeeded Mr. Nabors as the president's Congressional lobbyist. Gene Sperling, the chief White House economic adviser, was supposed to attend but had a scheduling conflict. Mr. Isakson rounded up Republican colleagues for the meeting at the request of the White House, just as he did for an April 10 dinner with a dozen Republican senators and Mr. Obama. That dinner came a month after the first such gathering that Mr. Obama arranged in March at a restaurant a couple of blocks from the White House. The March 6 dinner opened Mr. Obama's second-term strategy of outreach to Senate Republicans, reflecting that his legislative relations with Republican leaders in Congress had hit a wall after a tumultuous two years. Since they have refused to negotiate with him further about raising taxes on the wealthy, he has turned to Republican senators who have variously signaled openness to a tax-and-spending compromise along the lines that Mr. Obama wants. The ultimate goal of the White House strategy is to reach a deal that would get bipartisan approval in the Democratic-controlled Senate, thereby putting pressure on the Republican-controlled House. But first there has to be a deal between the Senate and the White House. The initial report on the administration officials" trip to the Capitol suggested that the two sides have some way to go and are only now discussing what form any substantive talks would take. But Mr. Isakson, asked about the prospects for a compromise, said: "When both sides are communicating, the odds are a lot better than when they're not. In the last four years, the communication lines were not that open. An earlier version of this post misstated the number of senior White House officials who attended a meeting on Capitol Hill with Republicans. There were three in attendance, not four.