It’s not quite LBJ losing Walter Cronkite on the Vietnam War, but the president has lost David Brooks:

Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist on notice. As Clive Crook, an Obama admirer, wrote in The Financial Times, the Obama budget “contains no trace of compromise. It makes no gesture, however small, however costless to its larger agenda, of a bipartisan approach to the great questions it addresses. It is a liberal’s dream of a new New Deal.”

Well, well. First Chris Buckley and now Brooks. Usually it takes more than a month for presidents to disappoint those they have bamboozled during the campaign. But, as Brooks points out, Obama threw caution to the winds when he unveiled his monstrous budget:

There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.

While Brooks styles himself as a moderate (or moderate conservative) and deplores the “Rush Limbaugh brigades,” the latter’s criticism matches Brooks’ precisely. And there’s the rub. Obama won by convincing Brooks-like moderates he was one of them. He thereby constructed a center-left coalition to win the presidency. But if Obama now governs as an ultra-liberal president what happens to that winning coalition?

For now it seems that the centrists and conservatives are in basic agreement: Obama’s plans are too expensive, too intrusive, too radical and just too much. We’ll see if that translates into a course adjustment by the president. If not, we’ll find out whether there is a sustainable majority in America for a program that is so radical as to cause David Brooks to sound like a CPAC featured speaker.