The White House already sees signs that the public pressure campaign is melting GOP opposition. | REUTERS Obama sees path to fiscal cliff win

Business executives and others who’ve met with President Barack Obama in recent days describe a president who’s supremely confident that he’ll come out on top of a fiscal cliff deal — with Republicans bending to his will on tax increases for the wealthy and Democrats sucking up deep spending cuts.

These people say Obama is dismissive of the idea that deduction limitations and loophole closings alone are a sufficient or even desirable way to achieve the $1 trillion or more in new revenue he is seeking. And they say the president believes his relentless public campaign — which continued Wednesday and hits the road on Friday — along with widespread support in polls for letting the top George W. Bush-era rate cuts expire will overwhelm any remaining GOP resistance.


( Also on POLITICO: Cliff dive doesn’t appeal to White House)

“For him the question on top rates isn’t just about fairness, it’s about math,” said one top financial services executive, who like others interviewed for this story declined to be identified by name in order to speak candidly about private meetings. “You might be able to get a similar amount of revenue but all of the deduction closings would create their own problems. Closing the mortgage deduction could hurt the housing market, for example. His commitment to rate increases is absolutely unshakable and he believes the politics are firmly on his side.”

The executive and others briefed on White House fiscal cliff strategy say if the GOP line against marginal rate increases somehow holds between now and the end of the year, when the fiscal cliff tax hikes and spending cuts begin to kick in, the president is confident he can use a pair of bully pulpit bazookas early next year — the second inaugural address and the State of the Union speech — to blast Republicans as holding the American economy hostage to a narrow and outdated ideology.

( See also: Reid: Tie debt ceiling, fiscal cliff)

The inaugural is usually more of a positive, sweeping kind of speech, but even that address would allow the president to clearly articulate his vision in contrast to that of Congressional Republicans, these people said.

“He’d rather get past this and use the speeches to lay out the vision for the second term on immigration, energy, climate, broader deficit reduction and other issues, but if he has to, he will call Republicans out yet again,” said the executive, who has been in White House meetings. “And they just don’t have anything like that kind of platform to respond.”

The executive and others who attended or were briefed on White House meetings added that the president was also adamant about having dividend and capital gains tax rates rise from their Bush-era levels but was not doctrinaire about exactly where they should wind up.

The White House already sees signs that the public pressure campaign is melting GOP opposition.

The latest example comes from Rep. Tom Cole, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The Oklahoma Republican said on Tuesday that the GOP should agree to a quick deal that keeps the Bush era tax rates for 98 percent of taxpayers while letting the top two rates increase.

Cole said doing so would not violate Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge signed by many Republicans because it would amount to approving a tax cut for most tax payers and simply doing nothing about the other rates, which were scheduled to expire under the legislation first pushed by Bush in 2001.

Although House Speaker John Boehner rejected Cole’s approach Wednesday, Norquist himself at a POLITICO Playbook Breakfast called the idea “an interesting tactic and strategy,” adding that he was more focused on getting spending cuts.

On that front, executives and others briefed on White House strategy say the president is well aware that some Democrats are showing a strong disinclination to accept any significant entitlement spending cuts as part of a fiscal cliff deal and also want an increase in the debt ceiling as part of the cliff package.

Obama knows that Republicans, by contrast, will have to get some significant spending concessions in order to sign off on tax increases and may resist a debt limit bump. If they don’t get real cuts, Republicans, including many key senators up for reelection in 2014, face increased prospects of bitter primary challenges. A deal with a small rate increase coupled with spending cuts would be much easier to sell to conservative constituents as an act of fiscal necessity.

So the president is aware that he, along with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and others, will have to do a strong sales job inside their party on some immediate spending trims along with a commitment to further reform.

One senior Democrat close to the White House said that despite current posturing, which this person said was more about laying down initial markers than setting absolute bottom lines, the party will eventually rally behind the president. “Trust me, at the end of this it’s not going to be our people that are the problem,” this person said.

Several Democrats have called for Social Security — which is less of a long-term deficit driver than Medicare and Medicaid — to be left totally out of the fiscal cliff talks. But executives who have been to White House meetings on the issue note that including the popular entitlement might actually ease the talks.

That is because among the easiest spending fixes — changing the calculation of benefits to one that relies on a less generous and more realistic inflation rate — comes from the Social Security reform tool kit. “I’m not sure in the end it will be off the table,” one executive said.

The bottom line from those who have attended White House meetings: The president believes he will get his marginal rate increase — though the income cut-off may rise to $500,000 — and Republicans will get some spending cuts and a commitment to broader entitlement and tax reform.

“I’d say two-thirds chance the deal is done or close enough to done by the end of the year to keep markets and everything else calm,” one executive said. “One-third chance the war goes on.”

Carrie Budoff Brown contributed to this report.

This article first appeared on POLITICO Pro at 1:58 p.m. on November 28, 2012.