Well, the Dems appear to have had their run of things for a year. Cue the removal of spines and the coming capitulation to the new “majority” in Congress:

The Obama administration has announced that in tomorrow’s State of the Union address, President Obama will call for a freeze on non-defense discretionary spending. The freeze — which will keep fiscal year 2012 and 2013 spending at the 2011 level — is designed to save $250 billion over ten years, and will “exempt security-related budgets for the Pentagon, foreign aid, the Veterans Administration and homeland security, as well as the entitlement programs that make up the biggest and fastest-growing part of the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

Of course, during the Presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) proposed a similar spending freeze, which Obama repeatedly condemned as an “example of unfair burden sharing,” and “using a hatchet where you need a scalpel.” [...]

Many economists have blasted the plan for its potentially anti-stimulative effects and its focus on spending that is not the root cause of the country’s long-term deficits. Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman wrote that the freeze is “appalling on every level…shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.” Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich said that the freeze “will make it impossible for [Obama] to do much of anything for the middle class that’s important.” U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong added “this is a perfect example of fundamental unseriousness: rather than make proposals that will actually tackle the long-term deficit…come up with a proposal that does short-term harm to the economy without tackling the deficit in any serious and significant way.”

And at its core, Obama’s decision cedes to the right-wing both the idea that blanket cuts are necessary and the notion that cuts should be focused on domestic programs while defense spending goes untouched. And already, the right-wing is claiming the freeze as a victory, with the National Review’s Jim Geraghty writing, “if the arguments in the coming years are between spending freezes and spending cuts, then we’ve already won.”

So, election year gimmick? Yep, I think so. I really did wish that the Democrats would have been able to hold onto their balls for a little bit longer.

Alas, history repeats itself.