Amid the sequester noncrisis, President Obama is attempting to revive political appetites for a grand budget bargain—and this time he's even calling Republicans on the phone and asking for support. Maybe he's finding that berating them in public as moral cretins doesn't inspire trust. That's progress, but what hasn't changed is that the deal he's offering as fair and "balanced" is neither grand nor a bargain.

If trimming $930 billion from the $46 trillion 10-year budget sounds less than impressive when Washington is running an annual $845 billion deficit despite a 17% surge in revenue this year, the details are even less of a concession.

• Health care, $400 billion. To put $400 billion in perspective, Medicare's long-term "unfunded liability"—the gap between promised benefits and the program's ability to fund them—is roughly $42.7 trillion. Mr. Obama's definition of reform is different. Medicare would continue its current march into insolvency, but at a slightly slower pace: some nips and tucks, but nothing approaching the larger modernization that the health safety net needs to survive.

• Social Security, $130 billion. there is broad bipartisan agreement about changing the consumer price index slightly to more accurately measure real inflation in the economy. Known as "chain weighted" CPI, this index reflects how consumers change their purchasing habits when prices change. But Mr. Obama can't bring himself to support it, while pretending that he does.

• Discretionary programs, $200 billion. Half would come from unspecified savings from the domestic accounts. These are the same programs that Mr. Obama also says are so lean that the sequester is forcing him to furlough meat inspectors and White House tour guides.

• Odds and ends, $200 billion.Here Mr. Obama continues his approach of taking a bit of money out of this and that pot, instead of prioritizing. He won't end a single program.

If Mr. Obama is serious about a grand bargain, he'll offer more than notional entitlement reforms and a grab bag of things his Administration ought to be doing anyway. There's no harm in Republicans listening, but his actual proposals show he's more interested in posing as a budget reformer than reforming the budget.

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