Washington, D.C. ? Pay attention carefully, but above all, pay attention quickly. This month we’re finally talking economics. Maybe that’s because this is the shortest month of the year. It’s also the month that includes Valentine’s Day, so full of romance and hope, and the release of the president’s federal budget proposal, so full of sobriety and despair.

So here we are, midway between budget day and Valentine’s Day, and we can hope that your evaluation of your love life is better than your evaluation of the country’s economic life. To help you think about this, let’s employ the thoughts of Louis de Bernieres, taken from his wonderful novel “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin”:

“Love is a temporary madness, it erupts like volcanoes and then subsides.”

We can only hope the same will happen with the budget deficit, which by President Barack Obama’s optimistic reckoning will hit $1.56 trillion this year, a startling figure even for a time when it is difficult to be startled.

De Bernieres went on a bit in his novel about love, examining the difference between “love” and “being in love,” and then concluded his romantic riff with a pinch of realism:

“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away.”

In the same regard, the deficit is what is left over when the economic distress has passed. Actually, the reason we call economics the dismal science is that often we get the deficit to deal with the distress, and then the deficit helps promote further distress. It is a lesson Washington learns and forgets every 20 years or so. This is another learning opportunity.

But give the president credit. He has heard the cries of the people and he, too, now believes the economy will make or break his presidency. This is another lesson Washington learns and forgets every couple of decades. The last president to learn it was George H.W. Bush, a president of many attributes and accomplishments — historians may soon regard him as one of the premier presidents of the post-World War II era — but not a president who served two terms.

This surely is giving Obama pause, and the evidence this is on his mind came not long ago when he made a remarkable comment to ABC’s Diane Sawyer: “I’d rather be a really good one-term president,” he said, “than a mediocre two-term president.”

This is an obvious reference to Henry Clay’s effort to find some middle ground on slavery before the Civil War, a difficult task that prompted the Kentuckian to say he would rather be right than president. Years later, House Speaker Thomas B. Reed said of a member of Congress who employed the Clay quote: “The gentleman need not be disturbed; he will never be either.”

Obama has a chance to be both, but it won’t be easy. The economic distress is deeper than the president believed and unemployment is worse, and more stubborn, than the president expected. An Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll recently provided some deeply troubling findings: Half of Americans have significantly reduced spending as a result of the recession. A third withdrew money from savings to make ends meet. Only about a third believe their personal financial situation will be better this year than it was last year. This is sobering stuff.

Some of this is not the president’s fault, of course. The decade beginning in 2000 was the first in modern times with zero net job creation. Household net worth grew by 44 percent in the 1960s and 58 percent in the 1980s. It fell by 4 percent in the “aughts.”

But to borrow a phrase from one of the great political philosophers of the last decade, Tina Turner: What’s fault got to do with it?

The president has been paying the price, deserved or not. Two voters out of five say Obama’s first year was worse than they expected, according to a Zogby International poll. The president will see the price rise if GDP and job creation don’t.

How would that price be extracted?

Part of it has already been realized; the prospects for the president’s health care initiative are dim if not dead, making him the second consecutive Democratic president to declare an overhaul of the health system his highest priority only to see his health care legislation tumble to defeat. Bill Clinton recovered, in part because the economy recovered. Moving with the wind at your back is more good luck than good strategy, but it beats battling the headwinds.

Now the president faces the prospect of further erosion of the Democratic majority on Capitol Hill in midterm congressional elections. The Republicans hope they will be a reprise of 1994, when the GOP captured both houses of Congress after less than two years of the Clinton presidency.

The Democrats start out with a slightly greater advantage in 2010 under Obama. They hold 59 percent of the House, about the same percentage as in 1994, but they have 59 seats in the Senate, as opposed to 56 the year they lost control of Capitol Hill. The public was furious in 1994. The same description applies now.

The United States recorded a budget deficit every year from fiscal 1969 to fiscal 1998 and the sky did not fall. But today’s budget deficit is of a magnitude that makes even Democrats worried. They know it is a dagger pointed at their Capitol Hill majorities.

They also know it is a threat to the country’s stability — and security. No country is safe when it outspends its revenues at this rate. This kind of economic behavior courts danger, not only from creditors but also from the missed opportunities it creates — the new programs and new defense initiatives the nation cannot undertake.

Here’s the problem in a paragraph: President Obama and the United States are facing a dual challenge. The economic crisis may prevent a recovery. But even if there is a recovery, there still will be a crisis. Bad situation, with bad choices — and likely bad outcomes.

— David Shribman is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.