Obama wants a spending freeze after boosting spending by 12 to 15 percent, or $780 billion stimulus plus $450 billion omnibus spending. Off the old Bush baseline, that’s still a huge spending build-up. Off the new Obama baseline, it’s still a big increase, but less big. Congress will not go along with it.

But Obama is trying to cater to the Scott Brown, tea-party, smaller-government trend: Maybe show some fiscal restraint. Stop the political and economic pain of the humongous debt-ceiling-increase proposal. Perhaps help the dollar, which rallied this morning.

Obama is going left on bank-bashing, and is now tacking center on spending. Maybe he wants to be a two-term president after all.

But the GOP has plenty to shoot at here, including Tom Coburn’s idea to take $150 billion out of the current services baseline, which would be great stuff.