David Brooks is enamored of the president’s Georgetown speech made last week on the economy (“a small masterpiece”). But in the final two paragraphs (after throwing in enough flattering words to keep the Obama spin patrol off his back, perhaps) Brooks zeroes in (on much the same grounds as the Washington Post editors did) on the underlying weakness in the Obama agenda:

Obama imposes hard choices on others, but has postponed his own. He presented an agenda that bleeds red ink a trillion dollars at a time. Now he seems passive as Congress kills his few revenue ideas (cap and trade) and spending cuts (agricultural subsidies). Huge fiscal gaps are opening this decade that can’t be closed by distant entitlement reform. They can’t be closed by cynical Potemkin cuts, a few million at a time.

This is not a matter of economics only, but credibility. Obama understands that this is primarily an authority crisis. A system Americans have trusted — the market — has failed in important ways. He has found a theme and bids to reassert authority. But he will seem like an impostor and a manipulator if he imposes responsibility on everybody but himself.

Gosh, that seems to be a rather large problem, one that undermines the entire new New Deal. (Brooks does not touch on some other serious flaws including the questionable premise that the government can set up huge bureaucracies to effectively manage healthcare, carbon output, industrial relations, and the rest.) Brooks’s honest appraisal is quite bracing: if the president is not telling the truth about his own fiscal plans (and instead pulling stunts like a $100M round of budget nibbling), how’s this all going to work? More importantly, how’s the Agent of Hope and Change going to survive politically once the public figures out this is a Ponzi scheme worthy of Bernie Madoff?

A president can deliver all the small verbal masterpieces he wants, but if his agenda is an easily uncovered scam it’s not going to get him very far. Even with those who admire his speeches.