Well, that didn’t take long: Less than two days after President Obama reluc tantly agreed to accept a less-than-whopping $38.5 billion in cuts from this year’s spending, the White House announced that Obama will take to the airwaves Wednesday to announce his new plan to deal with the deficit.

Paul Ryan, take a bow. With the release last week of his dramatic “Path to Prosperity” proposal to trim $6 trillion from the bloated federal budget over the next 10 years, a mere congressman from Wisconsin has finally obliged the president to get serious about spending. Or at least do a somewhat better job of pretending to.

Making the rounds of the Sunday shows yesterday, White House adviser David Plouffe announced that Obama will do what he does best in times of crisis — make a speech, this one about deficit reduction and what he intends to do about Medicare and Medicaid.

Plouffe has just given us a new definition of “chutzpah.” After two years of runaway spending and after proposing even more borrowing as recently as his February $3.7 trillion budget proposal — Obama now wants us to think that he’s seen the light and is serious about getting the country’s financial house in order.

Please. This is all about 1) the 2012 election and 2) blunting any GOP momentum toward serious budgetary reform — nothing more.

Obama, who’s always keenly attuned to the shifting political winds, knows he has to change course and doesn’t care how many fellow Democrats he has to jettison in order to do it. Thus his pirouette on the current year’s spending plan — in which he finally went along with the “draconian” cuts that the parade of talking-point donkeys like Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi had insisted would lead to the starvation of the elderly, the defenestration of children, the death of millions of women and the impoverishment of our soldiers.

Some principled Democrats are squawking over the president’s sellout on Friday. “The right held the US govt hostage, and O paid most of the ransom — inviting more hostage-taking,” wrote former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Twitter. “Next is raising debt ceiling.”

Yet there was the president on Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial, the park-ranger-in-chief, blithely telling tourists at the feet of the Great Emancipator that “this [the unclosed memorial] is what America is all about, everybody from different places enjoying those things that bind us together.”

After weeks of warning of the apocalypse, the leader of the Democratic Party, who never met imaginary or borrowed money that he didn’t want to spend, is now celebrating fiscal sobriety?

This about-face should surprise no one. As National Review’s Jim Geraghty is fond of reminding us, all Obama statements come with an expiration date. They are things said in the heat of political battle, not deeply held principles or beliefs.

Consider Sen. Obama’s comments in 2006 as he opposed raising the debt ceiling — the next big fight brewing on Capitol Hill:

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies . . . Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”

That year, President George W. Bush sought a debt limit of $8.96 trillion. Half a decade later, the limit — which has been raised 10 times in 10 years and by more than $2 trillion during the Obama presidency — must exceed the current $14.3 trillion by May 16, or the country faces either default on its bonds or dramatic (by 40 percent, in some estimates) cuts in federal spending,

With the Tea Party’s just having won a minor but important victory, and cutting spending now Job One in the public mind, it looks like we’ve come full circle.

If the president is serious about spending cuts, he’ll make common cause with Ryan — whose proposal may get a vote in the House as early as this week — and Speaker John Boehner.

Because the best thing anybody can say about the 11th-hour budget deal struck Friday night is that it’s just a barely adequate first step. In the eight days preceding the vote to cut $38.5 billion, our national debt jumped $54.1 billion.

Michael Walsh, a former asso ciate editor of Time, is the author (as David Kahane) of “Rules for Radical Conservatives.”