Barack Obama and Peter Orszag promise to tackle reality

Yesterday, in his second of rolling press conferences on the economy this week, the president-elect announced the coming of nothing less than a Budget Revolution. (Now there's some imagery for you: bloodthirsty accountants storming federal agencies, demanding, "Your papers, please.")

"Just because a program, a special-interest tax break, or corporate subsidy is hidden in this year's budget does not mean that it will survive the next," said Mr. Obama in Chicago. "The old ways of Washington simply can't meet the challenges of today and tomorrow."

Then, in case the wonkish programmers, special interests, corporate lobbyists and Washington old-timers hadn't caught his drift, he announced it again: "We cannot sustain a system that bleeds billions of taxpayer dollars on programs that have outlived their usefulness, or exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group."

And yet again, in one fell swoop of rallying-cry brevity: "We simply cannot afford it."

But before Obama's mike was even cold, the commentariat followed with its own announcement that the Revolution has been canceled, due to a yawning lack of interest, not to mention a veteran sense of incredulity.

They, as well as the wonks, lobbyists, etc., etc., had heard this one before -- in fact, it chimes from Washington every four years, like clockwork, good times and bad -- which sadly subtracted from, and probably wholly negated, its sum of urgent delivery.

Notwithstanding my enormous respect for Mr. Obama's intentions and sympathy for his cause -- and oh, do I ever sympathize -- I've got to go with the yapping and conventionally wise commentariat on this one. Nothing about the budget-creation and approval process will change on President Obama's watch, excepting that the "old ways of Washington" will grow a few years older.

And perhaps they shouldn't change.

All those narrowly targeted budget-line items that to 99 percent of us may seem like egregious waste are, to the solemn recipients of those tax dollars, a last-resort lifeline. They also, it should be noted, often represent dozens or hundreds or even thousands of jobs, which, no matter how head-scratching the work's content may be to us, the paychecks flowing from them wind up at car dealerships and grocery stores and donut shops.

They also keep Congressmen and women employed -- and that, the hallowed halls of horsetrading, it is nearly unnecessary to say, is where the Budget Revolutionaries in green eyeshades will hit their first immovable obstacles in the streets.

Every blessed slice of "pork" and special-interest programs -- and such programs, as one Concord Coalition member noted on the "PBS Newshour" last night, aren't entered into the budget under the easily identifiable heading of "Waste, Fraud, and Abuse" -- are but part of the American political tradition. Indeed, pork and fatty special interests and the like are a kind of macropolitical multiplier: Nothing would get done if the Congressperson weren't taken care of, first; but once accomplished the congested legislative seas of reason often part, to a degree, and cooperation flows, to a degree.

Aside from pork and programs that "exist solely because of the power of a politician, lobbyist, or interest group," there are of course money-saving efficiencies to be had in government, most notably in healthcare, as referenced yesterday by Mr. Obama. But again, political realties intrude.

We can dicker with computerizing health records and saving a dime or two in other healthcare ways from now till the cows -- or pigs -- come home, but the extraordinarily expensive mess of healthcare in America will not improve until we put every American under the guaranteed blanket of Medicare, or some such single-payer system.

It's just that simple -- not to mention simply humane -- and one could probably count on one hand the number of non-ideological healthcare economists who would dispute that.

You know it, I know it, Obama knows it -- but he knows as well that his eminently sensible calls for "smart government and effective government" won't on their own merits subdue the impractical ideologues of Congress.

Perhaps if he just sat them down and swore, on his grandmother's Bible, to veto every blessed piece of their career-saving pork until he gets smart, effective healthcare legislation? No, that wouldn't work, because then he'd be accused of reintroducing the "bickering" and "sniping," which he again denounced yesterday, of the "old ways" -- and virtually all progress on anything else would come to a halt.

What a boxed-in mess and boxed-in president.

There is, however, one person I would be even less willing to trade places with than President-elect Obama. And that's Peter Orszag, soon to be the neurotically, clinically depressed director of the Office of Management and Budget.

That poor man. He doesn't even get a big Air Force jet as compensation for having to suffer all those ideological jackasses in Congress.