No one can keep smiling during hard times like a good press secretary, so cheerful remarks from White House spokesman Ari Fleischer last week weren’t surprising after Congress gave up trying to pass a budget and went home. But there should be no doubt that his words, if they have any meaning, will make the budget work even more difficult when Congress reconvenes.

Mr. Fleischer was celebrating the fact that Congress did not greatly increase spending, an unusual occurrence in an intense election year. “There’s a new sheriff in town, and he’s dedicated to fiscal discipline,” Mr. Fleischer colorfully commented. “And Congress for the first time in a decade has listened to the new sheriff.”

Only Congress didn’t, because if Congress had listened it would have passed the homeland-security increases the president wanted, or said he wanted when he proposed them. It also would have passed the administration’s beefed-up budget for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees corporations. Instead, the fiscal discipline was achieved merely because Congress passed so little – two of 13 spending bills – and approved another round of continuing resolutions for department budgets until after the election.

The inability to reach agreement in either the House or Senate means that proposals to improve Medicare, increase funding for local education, reauthorize welfare and help states with widespread budget shortfalls are all on hold. The old word for what Mr. Fleischer described as fiscal discipline was gridlock – bipartisan, term-limits-inspiring gridlock.

His crowing makes this even worse, however, because it signals, especially to loyal House GOP members, that compromise is unwelcome. If the White House is pleased with inaction, they could well reason, then why work even within their own party to find agreement? At the state and local levels, the answer is clear.

Medicare reimbursement rates, widely recognized as inadequate, shift costs to everyone else with insurance; paltry federal support for mandated education standards are a direct burden, in Maine’s case, on property taxpayers; the lack of increased funding for environmental cleanup is slowing or stopping the cleaning and reuse of some contaminated sites. And even more seriously, the head of the National Institutes of Health told Congress recently that the lack of a new budget will likely require the NIH to reduce biodefense grants starting in December.

Neither the president’s priorities nor congressional priorities are being funded under the current standoff. The new sheriff would help if he would end the make believe that delaying needed spending is the same as saving money and begin working more diligently with Congress on areas of compromise.