Dead on arrival? It might make sense to apply that description to the president’s budget plan, especially considering the “inglorious fate” of a “nearly identical” budget he submitted for the current fiscal year. But Barron’s “D.C. Current” columnist Jim McTague sees signs of life in this year’s version of the Obama budget.

O’s budget, in my view, will be the opening move as congressional Republicans and Democrats work to replace the budgetary meat cleaver better known as the sequester with a surgical instrument. Expect negotiations to become intense as citizens feel the pain of lost jobs and some disappearing government services. Their shrill cries will excite the finely honed survival instincts of their local congressmen. Bipartisanship, which has been as elusive as the pileated woodpecker since the president’s swearing-in back in 2009, will make a sudden, temporary comeback. The deal most likely will include modest entitlement reform and the elimination of some tax deductions—enough to kick the problem down the road until after the 2014 election, as opposed to a grand bargain. After all, can-kicking is what Congress does best.

The wailing already has begun. California’s Orange County Register says that at Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base, towels and satellite radio at the gyms have been eliminated, and air-conditioning usage may be cut by 70%. According to the Monitor in McAllen, Texas, a school district there that borrowed $26.7 million with the help of federal subsidies will see its interest payments double from the current $109,000. In Indiana, the Elkhart Truth reports that the Indiana National Guard may delay the award of $30 million in military-construction projects in South Bend and Terre Haute.

O’s budget will be the starting point of the negotiations simply because it’s a daffy bipartisan grab bag, with goodies galore for everyone, whether you’re a fiscal hawk or a champion of cradle-to-grave federal services. So there’s common ground for talk, even among Democrats and Republicans.

The budget as a whole won’t survive, however, because it’s a tangle of contradictions, explained away by the president as “a balanced approach.”