President Obama got it right when he said the budget is about “more than just cutting and spending. It’s about the kind of future we want. It’s about the kind of country we believe in.” And, at long last, after years of the president’s ostrich-like approach to the huge federal deficits, and after months of partisan quibbling about less than 1 percent of the spending called for in the budget for this fiscal year, Americans will be given a choice. Never mind about the details: neither those contained in the president’s plan nor those in the alternative presented by Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan, chairman of the House Budget Committee, will necessarily survive the bargaining process that is about to begin.

Round one has gone to the Tea Party, much derided in the liberal press, and ridiculed by the foreign press as gun- and bible-toting ignoramuses infatuated with Sarah Palin and unlikely to hold a passport. Well, they have changed the national debate from how much more to spend to how much spending to cut, from deficits don’t matter to deficits are dangerous to the nation’s economic health. Doubt that and ask yourself whether the president who only a few months ago pushed for still another round of “stimulus” spending would ever have said, “Our debt has grown so large that we could do real damage to the economy if we don’t begin a process now to get our fiscal house in order.” His Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, did not intend to, but in fact did, pay homage to the Tea Party for changing the entire national debate when he told a business conference that the U.S. has made a “fundamental shift … That’s very important. It makes it very hard for future presidents, future Congresses to decide that you can live with the risk of higher deficits in the future.”