Watching the daily White House press briefings, it’s struck me lately that, if perhaps not quite in Jake Tapper territory, NBC’s Chuck Todd has been asking tougher questions.  Reporting on this morning’s Today about the gap between what the Obama admin claims the deficit to be, and the $2+ trillion-higher number calculated by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, Todd declared that Pres. Obama has a “credibility problem.” It was part of Today’s surprisingly skeptical take on PBO’s budget voodoo.

Co-anchor Lester Holt’s show opener broached the topic: “Deep debt. A new forecast says the new president’s ambitious economic agenda will put the country further into the red than he predicted.”

A bit later, during the opening schmooze with Amy Robach, Holt returned to the theme: “the president now has to contend with new numbers from the Congressional Budget Office saying his budget deficit estimates are off by about two trillion dollars.”

Holt asked Todd about the Obama-CBO gap when the NBC’s chief WH correspondent and political director appeared.

LESTER HOLT: What about this projection of the $2.3 trillion higher in terms of the deficit the Obama administration is now facing. Does that make it tougher for him to continue to sell his plan?

CHUCK TODD: The question is: what is the public hearing? They see the Congressional Budget Office put out these numbers, they say over the next ten years we’re going to acquire $9.2 trillion more in debt. Now you look at the president’s budget and he says: no, no, no.  It’s only going to be $7 trillion more in debt. The issue is that all of these numbers, they’re not sinking in with the American people. They just know it’s a lot of money. They know we’re going into debt.  Frankly, they don’t know what numbers to trust, and that’s the issue I think the president has to deal with. It’s his credibility problem on, OK, do we have the money to do this? Are we really going to save money.  He claims we’re going to cut the deficit in half in the next four years. OK, what is the deficit right now?

A credibility cloud with the MSM no bigger than a man’s hand, perhaps.  For now . . .

Note: view the video to hear PBO declare “I didn’t come here to pass on our problems to the next president or the next generation.  I came here to solve them.”  This is not the first time he’s made statements like this, and as I’ve written about, there’s an odd, quasi-religious tone to it.