WASHINGTON -- Just days from a fiscal meltdown, President Barack Obama and congressional leaders resumed stalled talks Friday and head into the weekend with a final attempt to negotiate a last-minute budget compromise that would avert looming tax increases for most Americans that could plunge the country back into recession.

After meeting for slightly more than an hour at the White House with Obama, the leaders of the nation’s two major parties said they were optimistic they could forge a scaled-down pact, with the Senate taking the lead.

The Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate said they would spend the next two days working to find a possible solution in time for votes Sunday night by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The Senate has been in session since Thursday; the House postponed its return to Sunday after talks broke down last week between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and failed to produce any kind of grand bargain to avert painful austerity moves scheduled to kick in over the next several days, while adopting alternative measures to rein in runaway deficits over time.

“I just had a good and constructive discussion here at the White House with Senate and House leadership about how to prevent this tax hike on the middle class, and I’m optimistic we may still be able to reach an agreement that can pass both houses in time,” Obama said at the White House after the Oval Office meeting.

He said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., were “working on such an agreement as we speak.”

Visibly frustrated, Obama said that if Reid and McConnell fail, he will ask Congress to vote on his original proposal to raise taxes on individual income above $200,000 and family income above $250,000, and also to extend jobless benefits for 2 million unemployed workers. It was unclear how he could get a vote, however, if the two parties do not agree on a proposal, given congressional rules.

“The American people are not going to have any patience for a politically self-inflicted wound to our economy,” Obama said in a six-minute statement in the White House Briefing Room. “We’ve got to get this done.”

A scaled-back proposal could also avert defense cuts slated to take place next week, stop the alternative minimum tax from hitting more taxpayers, and prevent a cut in doctors’ Medicare reimbursements.

“Whatever we come up with is going to be imperfect,” Reid said. “Some people aren’t going to like it. Some people will like it less. But that’s where we are. And I feel confident that we have an obligation to do the best we can. That was made very clear in the White House. We’re going to do the best we can for the caucuses that we have and the country that’s waiting for us to make a decision.”

As a fallback, Reid said he also was preparing a proposal to vote Monday on just Obama's original proposal, a vote that likely could not happen over Republican objections and would serve only as a final political statement of Democratic goals even if it did.

“At President Obama's request,” Reid said in a statement Friday evening, “I am readying a bill for a vote by Monday that will prevent a tax hike on middle-class families making up to $250,000, and that will include the additional, critical provisions outlined by President Obama. In the next 24 hours, I look forward to hearing any good-faith proposals Senator McConnell has for altering this bill.”