A few weeks ago, the Obama administration tried peddling $100M in budget cuts and got hammered. Today they tried a similar gambit — $17B and got hammered again. Press Secretary Gibbs was grilled on the cut representing less than 1% of the budget. We also learned that half of those billions coming from defense spending. The Washington Post explained just how flimsy the effort at fiscal discipline was:

The plan is less ambitious than the hit list former president George W. Bush produced last year, targeting 151 programs for $34 billion in savings. And like most of the cuts Bush sought, congressional sources and independent budget analysts yesterday predicted that Obama’s, too, would be a tough sell.

The proposed cuts, if adopted by Congress, would not actually reduce government spending. Obama’s budget would increase overall spending; any savings from the program terminations and reductions would be shifted to the president’s priorities.

And the kicker: a number of these spending cuts are really tax increases adding up to more than $26B.

But of course all of this is small beans. The administration is putting the finishing touches on hundreds of billions in healthcare reform. Whatever pennies in the couch the administration is searching for don’t begin to compare to the massive spending — a trillion on the stimulus and $3.5 trillion on the budget — already undertaken. These episodes of penny pinching, easily exposed even by the sympathetic mainstream media as rickety window dressing, tend to reinforce rather than soften the image of the president as a big spender. After all, how many times have we heard the $3.5 trillion budget figure in all the press coverage today?

The alternative would be to undertake serious spending reduction and moderate the healthcare spend-a-thon. But the president has no interest in all that — so spin is all that is left. And for once, not even the White House press corps is buying what he’s selling.