Jonathan Chait tells Liberals they should be okay with this Budget, believe it or not.

Food for thought from Why Obama's Budget Is OK:

Changing people's minds about government is hard. People support most actual programs, but they think foreign aid constitutes a huge part of the budget and you can generate mass savings by eliminating waste and bureaucracy. They've believed those things for a long time.

What's more, I actually see the administration's budget gambit as a subtle attempt to change peoples' minds. The administration is loudly publicizing the fact that it's cutting programs it thinks are necessary. The message, sometimes made explicit, is that the budget actually does not contain a lot of waste. It's filled with programs that have survived many previous rounds of belt-tightening for a reason. If you want to cut the budget, you have to cut useful and necessary things.

I don't think this will have a big effect. But I do think Obama is trying, in a passive-aggressive way, to do what liberals have demanded. He's explaining to the public that the free-ride view of budget cutting -- we can cut our way out of the deficit by eliminating waste and spending that only benefits foreigners -- is wrong. Obviously, having a budget in deficit during a period of mass unemployment and a GOP-led House immune to macroeconomic reason is a bad hand. I think ultimately Obama is playing it reasonably well.