What's Obama's ultimate agenda? Radical social change via government.

There's been a lot of speculation on the type of president Barack Obama will be. Will he be the cautious centralist or a radical social reformer?

In column, entitled "Obama's Plan to Transform America", Charles Krauthammer probably gets it right as much as anybody.

Krauthammer notes that

Barack Obama has garnered praise from center to right -- and has highly irritated the left -- with the centrism of his major appointments. Because Obama's own beliefs remain largely opaque, his appointments have led to the conclusion that he intends to govern from the center.

Obama the centrist? I'm not so sure.

Take the foreign policy team: Hillary Clinton, James Jones, and Bush holdover Robert Gates. As centrist as you can get. But the choice was far less ideological than practical. Obama has no intention of being a foreign policy president. Unlike, say, Nixon or Reagan, he does not have aspirations abroad. He simply wants quiet on his eastern and western fronts so that he can proceed with what he really cares about -- his domestic agenda.

Similarly his senior economic team, the brilliant trio of Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Paul Volcker: centrist, experienced and mainstream. But their principal task is to stabilize the financial system, a highly pragmatic task in which Obama has no particular ideological stake.

Why the centralist teams on foreign policy and economic policy? Because those areas he doesn't have great expertise and lacks passionate interest and are areas he needs stability if he's to accomplish what he wants domestically.

According to Krauthammer.

A functioning financial system is a necessary condition for a successful Obama presidency. As in foreign policy, Obama wants experts and veterans to manage and pacify universes in which he has little experience and less personal commitment. Their job is to keep credit flowing and the world at bay so that Obama can address his real ambition: to effect a domestic transformation as grand and ambitious as Franklin Roosevelt's.

As Obama revealingly said just last week, "this painful crisis also provides us with an opportunity to transform our economy to improve the lives of ordinary people." Transformation is his mission. Crisis provides the opportunity. The election provides him the power.

And he plans to use the economic crisis and public fears as a justification for his actions:

The deepening recession creates the opportunity for federal intervention and government experimentation on a scale unseen since the New Deal. A Republican administration has already done the ideological groundwork with its unprecedented intervention, culminating in the forced partial nationalization of nine of the largest banks, the kind of stuff that happens in Peronist Argentina with a gun on the table.

Obama was quite serious when he said he was going to change the world. And now he has a national crisis, a personal mandate, a pliant Congress, a desperate public -- and, at his disposal, the greatest pot of money in galactic history. (I include here the extrasolar planets.)

It begins with a near $1 trillion stimulus package. This is where Obama will show himself ideologically. It is his one great opportunity to plant the seeds for everything he cares about: a new green economy, universal health care, a labor resurgence, government as benevolent private-sector "partner." It is the community organizer's ultimate dream.

Rather than not having any money to do things, Obama plans on ramping up spending for public works and other programs.

Ironically, when the economy tanked in mid-September, it was assumed that both presidential candidates could simply forget about their domestic agendas because with $700 billion drained by financial system rescues, not a penny would be left to spend on anything else.

On the contrary. With the country clamoring for action and with all psychological barriers to government intervention obliterated (by the conservative party, no less), the stage is set for a young, ambitious, supremely confident president -- who sees himself as a world-historical figure before even having been sworn in -- to begin a restructuring of the American economy and the forging of a new relationship between government and people.

Don't be fooled by Bob Gates staying on. Obama didn't get elected to manage Afghanistan. He intends to transform America. And he has the money, the mandate and the moxie to go for it.

Krauthammer's analysis makes a lot of sense given what we know about Obama's background, ideological views, recent comments, and actions.

If he does dramatically expand government debt that will likely only deepen the debt and economic crisis facing our nation. What's different about 2000s crisis versus the Great Depression is today we are already much more deeply in debt and expanding bailouts and government spending will only worsen. If the federal government throws restraint to the wind, the debt level will become enormous. Somebody will eventually have to pay for it and no doubt it will be the American people in the form of much higher taxes and inflation, which is really a tax and especially hammers the poor and those on fixed incomes.

Obama's end game maybe closing the gap between the rich and the poor and socializing medicine, but that will result in making everybody poorer. Of course isn't that what socialism is all about?