Most of the political world spent Wednesday nursing hangovers from a long night of watching election returns and a long year of following the campaign. But in Washington, House Speaker John Boehner was pushing ahead with business. In a speech congratulating President Obama on his reelection, Boehner issued the standard call for bipartisanship and cooperation. But he also dropped a hint about his position on the next big item on the political agenda.

I’m talking about the budget reckoning that is scheduled to take place on January 1. Two things happen on that day. The Bush tax cuts, all of them, expire. And a series of automatic spending cuts, the so-called sequester, will take effect. Together, these changes would likely slow the economy. And while many experts believe the negative effect of this “fiscal cliff” be gradual—in other words, more a slope than a cliff—leaders of both parties say they would prefer to find an alternative method of reducing the deficit.

The hang-up has been a series of disputes over what that alternative should look like—chief among them, whether it should include new revenues. Republicans have generally opposed that idea. During the GOP primaries, Mitt Romney and the other candidates memorably said they would reject a budget deal that included even one dollar of revenue for every ten dollars in spending cuts. But Boehner on Wednesday suggested that maybe wasn't the party line after all: “We’re willing to accept new revenue under the right conditions,” he said.

Of course, it’s not clear how much ground Boehner really conceded. His statement was ambiguous, just like the signals he sent during the 2010 negotiations over whether and how to raise the nation's debt ceiling. He could simply have been describing a tax plan that, according to discredited supply-side economic theories, would generate new revenue from additional economic growth. Says one senior Democratic aide in the Senate:

Boehner is clearly trying to sound a conciliatory note in the wake of an election that didn’t go their way. That much is welcome. But if you unpack what he was saying, it’s not really a new position on taxes. He only opened the door to revenues through “dynamic scoring” as opposed to good, old-fashioned revenues that aren’t based on a supply-side economic theory and that can be scored by [the Joint Committee on Taxation].

More detailed parsings by Steve Benen, Kevin Drum and Suzy Khimm yield a similar conclusion: Boehner doesn't appear to be offering more than he did in the summer of 2011. That might not be surprising, given the pressure Boehner faces from conservatives within his caucus. But, given the political circumstances, it’s still a remarkable statement about how Republicans plan to approach this negotiation. After all, this election didn’t simply put Obama back into office. It also altered the political environment for the deficit debate, in a way that should make Obama and the Democrats much stronger.