After his last column critical of the Obama administration David Brooks was visited by four “top administration” figures — sort of like a Dickens’s tale without the period set design and costumes. Now he is certainly going to get a visitation from a flock of spin doctors after complaining that the president is taking his eye off the ball:

The president of the United States has decided to address this crisis while simultaneously tackling the four most complicated problems facing the nation: health care, energy, immigration and education. Why he has not also decided to spend his evenings mastering quantum mechanics and discovering the origins of consciousness is beyond me.

The results of this overload are evident on Capitol Hill. The banking plan is incomplete, and there is zero political will to pay for it. The president’s budget is being nibbled to death. The revenue ideas are dying one by one, while the spending ideas expand. By the latest estimate, the health care approach will cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years and the national debt will at least double, while the Chinese publicly complain about picking up the tab.

There is, I think, a problem of expectations here. Implicit in this criticism is the notion that if the president didn’t have such a darned inquisitive mind and such wonderful ideas for rearranging our lives he could use all that brainpower and economic expertise, point his brainy team in the right direction and solve the financial mess.

Does this week give anyone a sense that there are oodles of economic smarts and financial acumen floating around the administration waiting to be pointed in the right direction? Do we really think the president has accumulated the best and the brightest talent for this task?

It is a bit hard to understand how a relatively small item like the AIG bonuses got to be such a mess. None of the usual excuses apply here. It took a while, but we found one that can’t be fobbed off on George W. Bush. This is not an overly complicated issue (i.e. how to balance reasonable compensation with political appearances). This was not even one involving huge sums of money or complex financial instruments.

So we are left with the suspicion that if this was beyond the administration’s collective abilities, then those really hard and complex questions may not be subject to resolution anytime soon. It just might be that the president is filling up his day with summitry and basketball brackets, among other things, because he and his current crop of advisers simply don’t have a clue about the really big financial problems. So it’s understandable that the president might want to master quantum mechanics — or run off to California.