Yet the fact remains that long term senators rarely get elected as president.

Biden was running in '08, so was Chris Dodd, so were a lot of long-term senators.  I don't recall any of them receiving much support here.  There's a reason for that too.

David Dayen (emphasis mine):

Tim Geithner asked for an increase in the debt limit around August of 2009. This is a vote members of Congress don't like to take, but up until that time it had been fairly routine. But the above mentioned Democrats [Evan Bayh, Kent Conrad, Dianne Feinstein, Mark Warner and Joe Lieberman] threatened to hold the debt limit hostage:

Senators from both parties on Tuesday put new pressure on Speaker Nancy Pelosi to turn the power to trim entitlement benefits over to an independent commission.

Seven members of the Senate Budget Committee threatened during a Tuesday hearing to withhold their support for critical legislation to raise the debt ceiling if the bill calling for the creation of a bipartisan fiscal reform commission were not attached. (...)

(...) Congress is under pressure to raise the cap on what the federal government can borrow by mid-December. If the debt ceiling is not raised above its current $12.1 trillion mark by then, the government will exceed its borrowing limits and will be forced to default on the debt. Economists have warned that the inevitable result would be a lowering of the U.S. credit rating, triggering substantial increases in the interest rates the government is already paying.

But before Tuesday's hearing was over, Sens. Conrad, Gregg, Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), George Voinovich (R-Ohio) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) publicly vowed to vote against raising the debt ceiling if a budget reform commission bill doesn't come along with it.

Kent Conrad went so far as to say, "You rarely do have the leverage to make a fundamental change."

For the first time, perhaps in history, members of Congress tied spending cuts to raising the debt limit. This was the blueprint off of which John Boehner and the Republicans worked. The panel that Conrad wanted, along with Judd Gregg, would have had a mandate to reduce the deficit through spending caps, tax reform and entitlements, and would have submitted recommendations for an up-or-down vote without amendments or the possibility of the filibuster. That's EXACTLY what's in the bill being voted on today.

The Democrats pushing this ultimately backed down. Eventually, President Obama signed a clean $1.8 trillion debt limit increase in February 2010. But that obscures the issue. First, something did get attached to the debt limit bill - statutory paygo, requiring that all new spending be paid for with taxes or cuts. Second, because of the pressure that Conrad and the Democrats put on leadership, they got a guaranteed vote prior to the debt limit increase on their deficit commission. It would have passed if Republicans who previously supported the idea didn't bail at the last minute. At this point, President Obama, who had pivoted onto deficit reduction at the end of 2009, said he would by executive order put together the deficit commission. And so the original Catfood Commission was born. They've been talking about deficits in Washington, in the middle of a jobs crisis, ever since.

I think it would have been eminently possible to raise revenues.

Obama didn't want to.
So that made it impossible.

But a leader dedicated to the welfare of the people could have made it possible.