Inside the "dance steps" of shutdown negotiations

(CBS News) Though there seems to be agreement on lifting the debt ceiling without any conditions, there's a kind of dance going on between President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner right now, according to CBS News political director John Dickerson.

The president and Bohner are bargaining over a set of concessions that not only satisfy the president -- who doesn't want concessions "wrung out of him" because the government has been shut down -- and Boehner, who wants to show Republicans a set of concessions that prove he has won something in this long shutdown fight, Dickerson explained on "CBS This Morning."

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"So what John Boehner needs to find is some set of concessions that he can sell to his most conservatives or just to his entire conference to get them to support this move, and the White House is saying, 'We're open to talking about parts of the Affordable Care Act, but after you've ended the shutdown,' so it's a question of kind of sequencing here and that's what they're dancing around in negotiations," Dickerson said.

Watch Nancy Cordes' report on negotiations below.

Though entitlement reform will be a part of negotiations after the debt ceiling is raised, Dickerson said what's at stake right now is "the purchase price of opening the government again."

He explained, "That's still a big hurdle because the White House has always said we're not going to offer up things because you shut down the government. That's what they say to Republicans. Republicans want something, though, if after all of this back and forth, and that's what they're trying to figure out."

President Obama, Dickerson said, has to give Boehner some kind of assurance that they will talk about something having to do with the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, but that the president won't link it to reopening the government. Dickerson said, "He'll have to say, 'Sure, I'm open to talking about it,' but I'm not sure that's going to be enough, but that's about all the president is willing to give at the moment."

Republicans -- faced with a record-low approval rating -- are under increased pressure to negotiate with the president. Dickerson said, "There have been a lot of Republicans who said even before the government was shut down, that this was a political loser and so now there are a lot of Republicans saying, 'You see, I told you so,' these numbers that have been getting consistently getting worse for the Republicans. That puts a lot of pressure to reach a deal and that is behind a lot of the Republican movement here."

For more of Dickerson's analysis, watch his full "CTM" appearance above.