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Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham says President Barack Obama is a "small ball guy" but it's time for him to start "manning up" on cuts to earned benefits like Medicare and Social Security.

Speaking to Fox News host Martha MacCallum on Monday, Graham suggested that Republicans should not agree to tax rate hikes on the rich and should hold a debt ceiling increase hostage until Democrats agreed to "entitlement reform."

"Here's where the president is going to have a rude awakening," the senior senator from South Carolina opined. "In February or March, you have to raise the debt ceiling and I can tell you this, there's a hardening on the Republican side. We're not going to raise the debt ceiling, we're not going to let Obama borrow any more money or any American Congress borrow any more money until we fix this country from becoming Greece. And that requires significant entitlement reform to save Social Security and Medicare from bankruptcy."

MacCallum noted that Obama told business leaders last week that he would not "play that game" with Republicans because "we’ve got to break that habit" of allowing them to use the debt ceiling in budget negotiations.

"Yes, we will play that game, Mr. President, because this is not a game," Graham insisted. "The game you're playing is small ball. You're talking about raising rates on the top 2 percent that would run the government for 11 days. You just got re-elected. How about doing something big that's not liberal? How about doing something big that really is bipartisan? Every big idea he has is a liberal idea that drowns us in debt."

"How about manning up here, Mr. President, and use your mandate to bring this country together to stop us from becoming Greece?" he continued. "So when it comes debt ceiling time, Mr. President, you're going to have a Republican Party that's going to make sure we save Medicare and Social Security from bankruptcy and we save this country from becoming Greece."

Graham concluded: "He's a small ball guy. He's afraid of his own party."

A Washington Post fact check on Monday determined that Graham's assertion that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would go "bankrupt" was overblown because "the facts do not justify such rhetoric."

"In this case we are going to bump Graham up to Three Pinocchios," the Post's Glenn Kessler wrote. "Not only did he repeat the error of treating all of Medicare as one entity, but he did the same with Social Security. Moreover, his reference to Medicaid makes little sense, even if one has very expansive definitions of the words 'bankruptcy' and 'imminent.'"

(h/t: Think Progress)

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Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) on Sunday insisted that Republicans opposed raising taxes on the wealthy and supported cutting earned benefits like Social Security and Medicare because they were "the party of big ideas."

"Inside the [Republican] caucus, what people are looking at is how do we solve the system-wide problem," she explained to CNN's Candy Crowley. "And if you're going to talk revenues, you've got to talk cuts, you have to talk reform of your trust funds -- Medicare and Social Security -- and you've got to deal with entitlements."

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), however, advised Republicans to accept President Barack Obama's deal on raising rates on top earners "and just get that off the table" so that taxes would not go up on the other 98 percent of Americans.

"I have a different approach," Blackburn insisted. "The good thing is we are the party of big ideas. We are putting ideas out on the table and saying, 'This is how we solve this, let's talk about it.' Now, what I want to do is make certain no one's taxes go up. Let's look at cleaning up the tax code."

Crowley observed that it would be impossible to reform the tax code before the so-called fiscal cliff kicked in at the end of the year.

"You all lost the election," the CNN host told Blackburn. "Doesn't that put some limitations on what you can ask for here? You lost members of the House, you lost members of the Senate and you lost the White House."

"The president thinks he has momentum, I think he's running on adrenaline from the campaign," the Tennessee Republican replied. "Second thing, we won the House."

"The American people clearly said, 'We don't want our taxes to go up,'" she added. "You can not be practicing escapism and not putting these issues on the table. And it is an imperative to deal with the spending."

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House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) says he was "flabbergasted" when President Barack Obama opened debt talks by offering the same public positions that he campaigned on.

According to details circulated by Republican aides last week, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's offer included $1.6 trillion in taxes, $400 billion in entitlement spending cuts and $200 billion in new stimulus of payroll tax cuts and efforts to encourage homeowners to refinance. The White House also asked Republicans to raise the debt limit as part of a deal to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff.

"I was just flabbergasted," Boehner told Fox News host Chris Wallace on Sunday. "I looked at him and said, 'You can't be serious.' I've just never seen anything like it."

The Speaker insisted that Obama's first offer was a "non-serious proposal" because it included new stimulus measures.

"They wanted to extend unemployment benefits, they wanted a new stimulus program for infrastructure, they wanted to extend some other tax breaks," the Ohio Republican said. "And all of this new stimulus spending would literally be more than the spending cuts that he was willing to put on the table."

Boehner later added that a "balanced approach" would not include an increase in tax rates for the middle class.

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Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol is warning Republicans to stop blocking an extension of payroll tax cuts because the party is "looking as if they don't care about the middle class."

During a Sunday panel segment on Fox News, Kristol noted that President Barack Obama had embraced an extension of lower payroll tax rates.

"The Republicans are in real risk now of looking like they're defending keeping the current tax rates for the wealthy -- the Bush tax rates for the wealthy -- and right now the official Republican position is let the payroll tax rate go back up by 2 points. That is a 2 percentage point increase on every American, but it's a -- Republicans care about marginal rates -- it's a marginal increase on everyone making less than $100,000 a year."

"At the end of the day, President Obama is selling a very simple message, 'I want to keep taxes low for middle-class Americans,' and Republicans look like -- I'm worried are in the position of looking as if they don't care about the middle class and just want to keep tax rates low for wealthy Americans."

Kristol pointed out the Obama administration was in a "stronger position" when it came to negotiations to avoid the so-called fiscal cliff because "the president is the president."

"I think we've seen in a history of those showdowns, the White House usually wins," the conservative columnist explained. "And the main reason the White House usually wins is there's a unitary executive and the majority party in Congress is in a weaker position."

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Rep. Peter King (R-NY) says that Republicans in the House of Representatives have a "mandate" to prevent tax cuts for the rich and other Americans from expiring even though exit polls showed voters supported tax hikes.

"As far as Congress, Republicans feel strongly that tax rates should not be increased," King told CNN's Candy Crowley on Sunday. "Having said that, I think John Boehner -- Speaker Boehner has shown his willingness to work out an agreement here. That can be done by effecting deductions, loopholes -- which would include those in the upper brackets -- so that the president could get the revenue that he says that he's looking for, but it will be done in a way that tax rates are not increased."

He added: "So it can be said that while President Obama won -- and he did win -- the fact is in the Congress, the American people have returned a Republican House of Representatives. So we also have if you want to call it a mandate."

"Having said that, I think if there's any mandate, it's to try to reach compromise and try to reach common ground, and I think Speaker Boehner has put enough on the table that a real compromise can be reached."

In exit polls released on Tuesday, six in ten voters said they supported raising taxes. Almost half wanted to see tax hikes specifically on those making more than $250,000 a year.

"On this particular issue, it wasn't close," Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod told CBS News on Sunday.

"You need new revenues, and every objective person who has looked at this agrees on that, so the question is where is that revenue going to come from?" he pointed out. "The president believes it is more equitable to get that from the wealthiest Americans who have done very well and frankly don't need those tax cuts and who benefited disproportionately from the tax cuts in the last decade. Most Americans agree with that."