News that the budget deficit could hit $1.2 trillion is shocking — so shocking that it might deflect what should be a grateful focus on President-elect Obama’s declaration that entitlement reform would be “a central part” of his efforts to control spending.

The incoming president, like the outgoing one, recognizes the urgent need to control entitlement spending to avert a fiscal wreck now upon the nation.

When President Bush won his second term in 2004, one of his first utterances was that his reelection accrued political capital that he would spend by pushing for reform of Social Security.

As it turned out, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina burned through Bush’s political capital quickly, and he had none left for reform — not that he appeared really to put the weight of his office forcefully behind it. And the Social Security reform proposal received a lukewarm reception, at best, from congressional Republicans.

It is intriguing, now that we are four years closer to the oncoming disaster, to see the next president, a politician whose views differ radically from those of the incumbent, nevertheless coming to largely the same conclusion. The country cannot afford, or will shortly be unable to afford, to meet its entitlement promises.

Obama has not given any details yet of how he proposes closing the massive fiscal gap, and his first hints are that he will focus as much on Medicare as on Social Security. One of the criticisms of Bush’s proposal was that he was focusing on Social Security when Medicare was the bigger problem; this charge was true but hardly persuasive not to act on revamping the system.

Another criticism of Bush’s proposal was that it amounted to “privatization.” This was partly true, for each citizen would have been able to create a personal account and a portion of his or her Social Security taxes would have been managed there by the private sector. It will be fascinating to see how Obama avoids the inevitable charge of slashing benefits.

That may be an impossible task, but it is arguably easier for a Democratic president than a Republican to cut benefits, just as it was easier for a Republican president to thaw relations with China. On the other hand, President Reagan signed a Social Security fix in 1986, so aggressive and effective reform is less a matter of party than of political will.

The core point, though, is that Obama has exhumed the issue of entitlement reform only a short time after it was interred. Pundits speculated that the failure in 2005 buried the issue for a decade. But the fiscal picture is so dire that it cannot be ignored any longer.

The most astringent opponents of Social Security reform or any suggestion that benefits needed to be reduced came from Obama’s own party. Cutting payments, or delaying them by raising the age at which entitlements kick in, will be a hard sell on Capitol Hill.

A hard sell — but Obama has political capital to spend.