Does President Obama's budget even matter?

President Obama released his fiscal 2014 budget early Wednesday, two months late and in the middle — ideologically as well as figuratively — of several competing budgets in the House and Senate. Obama's proposal is already catching flak from the left and the right, and "obviously this budget isn't going to be passed by the House," says Matthew Yglesias at Slate. "So in a sense delving into the details doesn't even matter here," but the ideological clash this sets up with Rep. Paul Ryan's (R-Wisc.) budget is worth paying attention to.

No, it isn't, says Ed Rogers at The Washington Post. "Obama is so late to the game that his budget might be irrelevant," and he "already leaked parts of the plan to friendlies and gotten the headlines he wants" days ago, so there's not even much news value to this big unveil. House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will rightly want to "dismiss this budget out of hand, with a shrug or an insult, and move on."

Obama's budget release "may seem a little anticlimactic," says Frank James at NPR, "but even a budget that's going nowhere gives a president the chance to state priorities and place dollar amounts next to them." Economists will pore over the White House's inevitably optimistic projections for the economy, but budgets are also political documents.

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Obama is "going to try to make himself look a little more bipartisan, a little bit more centrist, a little bit more willing to compromise," says federal budget expert Stan Collender. "And to do that he's going to submit a budget that Republicans and Democrats are going to hate equally."

Yes, the Obama budget is "catching hell from both sides," says John Avlon at The Daily Beast. And that's how you know it's "a good one."

But the politics works for the president, too, says Dana Milbank at The Washington Post. The liberal outrage just makes Obama look "like the reasonable one — and Republicans look unreasonable if they continue to carp about Obama's proposal without offering more tax hikes." Granted, "the liberals' objections are legitimate — particularly their resistance to a stingier inflation formula for Social Security, which isn't as big a budget problem as Medicare." But "the progressives' street protest did Obama a favor."