IN THE days after the election of Scott Brown as the new Senator from Massachusetts, many left-leaning pundits echoed the message that what bothered them most about the outcome was not the defeat itself but the overreaction from the Democratic leadership. The loss was disappointing, no doubt, but Democratic legislators seemed to be treating the defeat of a terrible candidate by a very good one in a special election in one state as the very death knell of their party. Republicans, by contrast, reacted to their overwhelming electoral defeat in November of 2008 by bucking themselves up to stand firm against the new president and large majorities in both houses of Congress.

I suspect those left-leaning bloggers will be fuming tomorrow:

On an exciting phone call with progressive internet writers earlier this evening, a senior administration official outlined the Obama administration's plan to call for a freeze in non-security discretionary spending starting with the Fiscal Year 2011 budget. Described as an effort to balance concern with a “massive GDP gap” in the short run and “very substantial budget deficits out over time,” the plan calls for the FY 2011 budget to be higher than the FY 2010 budget, but then for non-security discretionary spending to be held constant in FY 2012 and FY 2013. (Let me note right here that all of the reporters on the call, myself included, screwed up and forgot to seek clarification as to whether this is a nominal freeze or a real dollar freeze). The freeze would not apply to the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, or to the foreign operations budget of the State Department. The official emphasized that the freeze is not the only element of the administration's plans for deficit reduction, just the only element he was prepared to discuss on this particular call. “This is only one component of an overall budget,” he said, “you'll see other components on Monday.” So is this an across-the-board freeze like we've heard Republicans call for? No, it's “not a blunt across the board freeze.” Rather, some agencies will see their budgets go up and others will go down, producing an overall freeze effect. The senior official sought to portray this as not just a question of spending less money, but of getting our money's worth—cutting (unspecified) ineffective programs and spending more on programs that work.

Here's the New York Times version of the story. There really is no good way to interpret this turn of events. From the standpoint of the purely economical, this is a huge mistake. Even if we assume that the economy will be strong enough in 2011 to handle budget balancing, this proposal is practically worthless. The administration has said this will produce $250 billion in savings over ten years, but as The Economistnoted in November, the fiscal deficit will be over $700 billion in 2014 alone, and will grow from there. Non-defence discretionary spending is nothing; those who are serious about long-term budget sustainability talk about defence, they talk about entitlements, and they talk about revenues. In other words, this will do very little about the deficit, and it will do even less to convince markets of the credibility of the American effort to trim the deficit.

So perhaps this is all about politics? Well, maybe, but there are two enormous problems with that. One is that the campaign-trail version of Barack Obama railed against John McCain's proposal for a spending freeze, rightly, as using a hatchet where a scalpel was needed. It's unlikely that Mr Obama's political opponents will let him forget that. The other is that this is a complete betrayal of the political ideal Mr Obama seemed to espouse from the beginning of his political career—the rejection of the argument by the lowest common denominator in favour of a more reasoned and argued approach. This is yet another move toward the infantilisation of the electorate; whatever the gamesmanship behind the proposal, Mr Obama has apparently concluded that the electorate can't be expected to handle anything like a real description of the tough decisions which must be made. I sympathise with Mr Obama's position—would that American voters were patient enough to hear and consider a detailed policy discussion on a complex issue—but it's unreasonable to expect that Americans can be hoodwinked into major policy shifts.

And this is an incredibly risky political gamble for the president. Much of the liberal base of the Democratic party was already prepared to mutiny after the overreaction to the Massachusetts defeat and the abandonment of the health-care reform bill. This may well drive them over the edge. If it weren't enough that the proposal treats voters as children and a serious problem as a political football to be kicked around, the president's plan also appears to endanger an economy that hasn't meaningfully raised employment in over a decade and it solidifies defence spending as the untouchable budget category, when in fact it should be anything but.

I understand the arguments from supporters of the president that this is a poltical gambit, that it won't actually amount to much but a sound talking point and a tool with which to co-opt the president's moderate antagonists. What's the difference? Seriously. How does the president move from this to any important policy goal? What room does this leave him to deal with either the jobless recovery or the long-run budget deficit?

Through bad times and good times for the president, there was one word I never associated with him and his approach to the challenges facing the country: gimmick. But this is a bright shining gimmick that advertises a lack of seriousness to both near-term economic weakness and long-run budget problems. This is decidedly not what is needed right now. If this is the best the president can do, Democrats, and the country, are in for a very long few years.