Ah, yes, wait'll next year! Isn't that what Brooklyn Dodgers fans used to say -- every year? Besides, aren't relievers sent in to save the game, turn it around, put out the fire ... not just throw the same pitches that got the team in trouble in the first place?

Not everybody on the team is prepared to just go on repeating the same motions. To quote Evan Bayh, the Democratic senator from Indiana:

"Last week I was pleased to attend the president's White House Fiscal Responsibility Summit. It's about time we had a leader committed to addressing the deficit, and Mr. Obama deserves great credit for doing so. But what ultimately matters are not meetings or words, but actions. Those who vote for the omnibus this week -- after standing with the president and pledging to slice our deficit in half last week -- jeopardize their credibility."

If the country is going to come out of this fiscal dive rather than prolong it, credibility is important in a leader. No credibility, no confidence. No confidence, no investing. And no investing, no long-term economic growth.

What ever happened to all those promises Barack Obama made during the campaign to reduce the deficit, avoid the kind of congressional earmarks that remain the bane of sound budgeting, and generally do the responsible thing when it comes to government spending? Only lip service to those goals remains.

Or as Senator Bayh put it, "Voters rightly demanded change in November's election, but this approach to spending represents business as usual in Washington, not the voters' mandate."

Instead of narrowing the focus of economic policy to produce jobs, jobs, jobs -- as John McCain and almost all his Republican colleagues in the Senate proposed -- this $410-billion budget doesn't seem to have any single aim at all; it just spends in all directions. And it comes on top of an equally feckless three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar spending bill that was called a stimulus but looked all too much like a vehicle for rewarding the Democrats' favorite interests -- from ACORN to the teachers' unions.

What this administration needs to offer is more clarity, less confusion. More plan, less patronage. More investment, less ideology.