I'm going to excerpt from this prominent right-wing site.

HotAir.com: What if it's not really about the sequester?
Cutting $85 billion from a $3.7 trillion budget is a reduction of only 2.3%. I haven’t worked for a company yet that hasn’t had to impose across-the-board reductions in spending at one time or another with a much larger magnitude in almost all cases. Millions of American families have had to cut a lot more than 2.3% of their budgets thanks to the Great Recession and the Obama recovery flop.
Hello allegedly well informed political commentator. Do you realize that it's not 2.3% "across the board". It's an insane amount of cuts across many different discretionary programs. My calculation is that it is potentially a 16% cut over the remainder of the fiscal year. Even the representative I saw on TV was smart enough to explain that 2/3rds of the spending was "automatic" and that's really what the GOP is after.
Consider this, too: the sequester cuts aren’t anywhere near as draconian as Obama and his Cabinet have suddenly proclaimed them to be. However, the House will probably produce much more significant cuts in the next round of the CR, and in the FY2014 budget. Obama wants everyone to believe we’re absorbing all of the pain we possibly can now in order to cut the ground out from the House GOP in the next fight.
Wrong again! There's already agreed-to budget caps for discretionary spending and the agreed to seqeuester amounts. The House GOP would be insane to try to cut more than the sequester already cuts. The sequester is already breaking the GOP caucus. What I haven't heard so much about is the breaking of the Democratic caucus; but I think they will start to feel a lot of pain too.

Ultimately, I've come to the conclusion that Obama wants sequestration because he also thinks that we should have some type of grand bargain.

Although I didn't hear anyone really putting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid reform on the table. The sequester is all about pressuring the people who benefit from the discretionary programs to jump up and down about the social insurance/entitlement programs. It really is a blunt instrument... but I really wonder if there is a "grand bargain" it will placate the GOP/TEA party.