Boehner the big winner in budget talks: Analyst

House Speaker John Boehner emerged the star when tense negotiations among congressional leaders wound up heading off a government shutdown, in the eyes of CBS News political analyst John Dickerson.

"He's the big victor, indeed," Dickerson told "Early Show on Saturday Morning" co-anchor Jeff Glor. ... The number of people (among Republicans) unhappy with the Speaker is small. ... The priorities that Speaker Boehner had are the priorities you have to have when you're trying to get your members together, get something that can actually pass, and negotiate with the other house of Congress, and with the White House.

"Republicans are often saying, 'Look, we only control just the House of Representatives. There are these other two big forces in Washington.' Given that there are those two other big forces, John Boehner got a lot of spending reductions that Republicans wanted, [and] moved Democrats much closer to where the Republican position was. So it was a big, big night for him."

President Obama, Glor noted, praised the deal. But was he a winner here?

"It is rather awkward for him," Dickerson responded. "Earlier in the week, when he gave a news conference, he seemed irritated that he had to get involved at all in this sort of bickering between the two houses of Congress. He got involved. He was certainly pressuring Speaker Boehner at various points.

"But if we compare this to the deal that the president struck at the end of last year, on the Bush tax cuts, [where] he was able to say, 'Look, Republicans got what they wanted in the tax cuts, and we got other things for lower income Americans, and things that progressives and liberals would like,' - in this case, what he got was just that the deal wasn't as bad as they thought it was going to be.

"There aren't a lot of things in here that the president can say, 'I won these things.' He can only say, 'I kept these bad things from happening.' "

Tea Party members, Dickerson noted, also "didn't get everything they wanted. But they certainly were on John Boehner's mind all the time, and that's one of the reasons he really stuck to his guns here, and pushed this to the last minute. And they will also be trying to prove that they are still as powerful as they were since they didn't get all of the cuts they wanted. So, yes, this will be something we'll be talking about in this (upcoming) larger budget battle (over the next fiscal year and beyond), for sure."

As talks continued down to the wire Friday, the two sides had one news conference after another, blaming the other side for the wrangling that appeared destined to close Uncle Sam for business. But Dickerson says that not only won't result in any lingering damage, it could actually help the political landscape in Washington.

"The public pronouncements and finger-pointing and accusations, that's the sort of baseline - that's the thing that still exists. And so that is what we'll go back to now on this bigger fight, about the large budget. We've been fighting now only about a tiny sliver of it, from last year's business.

"Now we have a question about the entire priorities of government, what its role is, and these very, very hot-button issues like entitlements and how we take care of the poor - I mean, every issue that is involved in government. One thing that's good that came out of this negotiation is that you now have the leaders of government, they know each other, they've been in a tough spot, and that will help when these bigger issues come forward."