If President Obama has his way on the budget, or most of it, history will write of three political revolutions in this country in a little less than a century—Roosevelt’s, Reagan’s and Obama’s.

Unlike the New Deal, which for all the freneticism of the First Hundred Days, actually unfolded in stages, with Social Security waiting until Roosevelt’s third year, Barack Obama moved last week on every front. He took a page from the Reagan Revolution, when a conservative President moved all the elements of a radically new agenda simultaneously. Obama is not only unwinding Reagan’s policies, he is offering a Rooseveltian paradigm that justifies big government pragmatically—by arguing that what matters is not the size of government, but how it works.

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Robert Shrum has been a senior adviser to the Gore 2000 presidential campaign, the campaign of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and the British Labour Party. In addition to being the chief strategist for the 2004 Kerry-Edwards campaign, Shrum has advised thirty winning U.S. Senate campaigns; eight winning campaigns for governor; mayors of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other major cities; and the Democratic Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. Shrum's writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. The author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner (Simon and Schuster), he is currently a Senior Fellow at New York University's Wagner School of Public Service.