PETER SUDERMAN: Obama Brags About His Deficit Reduction, But As a Senator, He Would Have Been a Critic.

“When I took office,” President Obama bragged last week, “the deficit was nearly 10 percent of our economy. Today, it’s approaching 3 percent.”

All true. And yet it’s worth putting the declining deficit in context, and remembering that, as a Senator, Obama probably would have been appalled by his current deficits.

The year’s deficit total, just shy of half a trillion dollars, represents a big drop from the $1.4 trillion peak it hit in Obama’s first term. (More than 40 percent of that reduction came as a result of tax hikes.) But the reduction only came following a massive 800 percent increase in annual deficits.

Notably, it’s still much higher than the typical deficits during the Bush years, which, you may recall, were worrisomely large—indeed, they were large enough that Obama, as a Senator in 2005, declared that “you don’t have to be a deficit hawk to be disturbed by the growing gap between revenues and expenses.” Between the 2006 and 2007 fiscal years, the deficit dropped from $248 billion to $160 billion.

The Bush-era deficit totals, far lower than his own second-term deficits, were “a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government’s reckless fiscal policies.” Obama even opposed an increase in the nation’s debt limit.

But look where we are now: Not only are this year’s lowered deficits still much higher than the deficits he was worried about during his predecessor’s presidency, they are on track to skyrocket again.

That Senator Obama seemed like a sensible fellow. I wish he were President now.