David Broder's column in yesterday's Post, Deficit Day Of Reckoning? dutifully recounts the Democratic congressional leadership's guidelines for fiscal responsibility, sent to President Bush in a Jan. 26 letter. The letters urges that Bush's FY 2008 budget, due next Monday, Feb. 5:

• account realistically for projected federal costs
• realistically project short- and long-term deficits
• provide detail throughout the entire budget period so that the choices required to meet the budget goals are clear
• be based on fiscal discipline that is sustained over the long term

Broder cites two senior administration officials who give assurances that Bush's budget ... will become a starting point for serious negotiation -- not a partisan football or simple laughingstock. [They] pledged to make visible the costs of the war and to be specific about the trade-offs needed to maintain budget discipline, [using] the economic assumptions underlying the president's budget are modest -- if anything, an underestimate of the revenue likely to be produced by a growing economy. All very well and good, but even making good on all these assurances will not be enough to ensure that the administration's budget is taken seriously. If the budget calls for a laughable level of domestic discretionary program spending cuts, you will hear that familiar phrase.... D.O.A.