Is Obama out of touch with his own spending?

Mickey Kaus:

Today’s NYT campaign notebook has Obama sluicing the controversial Nutting Marketwatch chart straight off the Internet into a campaign speech, in which he proclaims “Since I’ve been president, federal spending has risen at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years.” (The exact sequence seems to be Nutting’s keyboard to Web to Carney to Obama to the world.) Obama’s instantaneous embrace of Nutting’s chart–a calculation so absurd even Ezra Klein tried to change the subject, since (among other things) it  attributes most of Obama’s $800+ billion stimulus to Bush–raises an interesting pair of possibilities:

a) Does Obama really not have an intuitive feeling for how much he’s been spending? That’s a little like not remembering how much sex you’re having. He’s the one doing the spending, after all. Even if he wasn’t, you’d think an ordinary BS detector would kick in. It’s one thing to expect MSNBC viewers to be credulous. It’s another thing …

or

b) Obama doesn’t care if it’s BS as long as it might work.**

...

I vote for all of the above.  While many have destroyed the premise of he Nutting piece, what few have mentioned is the compounding effect of the big spending in Obama's firs year because base line budgeting just keeps adding to it with a percentage increase above the previous years base line.  I am not sure Obama even knows what base line budgeting is, but Democrats are always quick to label any decrease in the growth of spending as a cut.