Most of the media are focused on the mere fact that President Obama and Paul Ryan are having lunch together at all. (Democrat Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is going to be there too, but where’s the intrigue in mentioning that?)

But the real story is what Obama hopes to gain from the process in setting the nation’s budgetary direction. If Politico can be believed - and I realize what a huge if that is - one of Obama’s priorities is definitely not encouraging:

By speaking directly with Ryan, Obama is hoping to enlist a powerful ally in convincing leadership to abandon its insistence on subjecting all future measures on the debt, deficit, taxes and entitlement reform to “regular order,” the tortuous committee process dominated by party conservatives, according to a person close to the process.

For those not familiar with Washingtonspeak, “regular order” means they actually pass a real budget every year, instead of stringing together a series of continuing resolutions as they’ve been doing since 2010 - the process that has done so much to reduce the deficit and prevent constant fiscal crises. Oh. Wait.

Why is this process “tortuous” as Politico insists? Because politicians have to do a lot of hard working negotiating through their differences, and they have to put their priorities on the record for the public to scrutinize. This was the normal state of affairs before 2010, when Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi realized they could not add the $862 billion allocated in the “one-time stimulus” of 2009 to the budget baseline and get away with it if they passed a real budget.

So they just stopped doing that. Along the way, they found that the constant crisis showdowns with Republicans that resulted proved quite useful to them politically. And since the media would not call them to account for failing to do their jobs, why should they bother? Besides, even after the Republicans took control of the House in 2011, John Boehner proved too weak to insist on real budgets and countenanced the passage of the continuing resolutions.

Harry Reid’s refusal to do his job has been made easy by the media’s disinclination, and John Boehner’s fear, of challenging him on it.

All this has been a boon to Barack Obama, who has presided over a spending explosion without having to pass real budgets that lay this fact bare for everyone to see. And now he’s hoping Paul Ryan will help him to continue the sham. I can’t imagine Ryan will do so, but if he does, he is not the man a lot of us have, up to this point, believed him to be.