President has small edge on fiscal cliff leverage – WSJ

Jerry Seib on The News Hub looks at four ways leverage has tilted–slightly but perceptibly–toward President Obama in the current budget showdown with Congress. Seib points out any negotiator will tell you that the key in a bargaining session is knowing at the outset who has leverage, and where it comes from. “So it is in the great deficit-cutting showdown now under way between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans. The problem the GOP faces is relatively simple: In the aftermath of the election, the leverage in this negotiation has shifted, slightly but perceptibly, toward the president. Some of the president’s usual need for caution and calculation has been lifted, as he won’t be worrying about another presidential campaign.”

Seib reckons Obama now has advantages in four areas, some obvious, some more subtle:

1) Democrats won in the election. Obama won a modest victory in the national vote but a decisive victory in the Electoral College. The size of that victory may be less important than the fact that, as the president will be reminding us all from time to time, the clearest point of departure between Obama and Republican Mitt Romney during the campaign was their difference on whether tax rates ought to be raised on the top 2% of taxpayers as part of a deficit-reduction deal. And Obama won.