During the transition, I entertained a hopeful hypothesis that Barack Obama was a sheep in wolf's clothing, a center-left statesman so perceptive, patriotic, and post-partisan that he might well govern center-right. Okay--I was wrong in a big way. Most of you were right. Implausible as it might seem to me, Sean Hannity had it right ("the radicals have taken over...").

As it turns out, Barack Obama really is a "liberal" in the tradition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who worked so assiduously during the 1930s to give the term "liberalism" its modern political meaning: an ideology that favors a powerful and active state committed to social justice and public welfare. In that sense, we now understand that this president is the most committed liberal to sit in the Oval Office since Lyndon Johnson, a Roosevelt acolyte, who attempted to complete the project of transforming the United States into a European-style welfare state during the 1960s.

What is at stake? Think on this: the national transfiguration from limited constitutional governance envisioned during the founding to the modern leviathan we encounter today boils down to two very brief periods in our 225-plus year history.

1933-1937. The New Deal, while failing to solve the immediate economic crisis that fueled its revolutionary ethos, succeeded in forever instilling a popular expectation of government as guarantor of public welfare and individual prosperity. Franklin Roosevelt expertly recast the conception of individual liberty, forever linking freedom to insulation from personal misfortune and a government-given right to "a healthy peacetime life" for its citizens.

1965-1967. The Great Society, coming three decades later, proved wildly unsuccessful at defeating poverty and a litany of other targeted ills that beset humankind in general and our national community in particular. No matter, Lyndon Johnson's New Deal 2.0 further insinuated the virus of personal dependence on the state into the American body politic.

What do those two periods have in common? A powerful liberal president bent on radically remaking the American system paired with a happily compliant overwhelming majority in Congress. One emerged during a period of economic crisis, one during a period of great prosperity, but both presidents understood perfectly the small window of opportunity for a massive re-imagining of the American creed.

Now, some forty-odd years later, we are most likely on the brink of the next (perhaps final) phase of the great transformation of American society. The President understands that he is in the midst of a moment ripe for completing the massive project began so many decades ago. This window won't last for long, but the President and his rubber-stamp Congress don't need all that much time.

What is at stake? Forgive the analogy, but being a conservative is a lot like the old anti-terrorism conundrum. The haunting reality of your mission is that you must defeat your opponent everyday to win, while your opponent only needs to beat you once to totally defeat you.

An Aside: how bad is it really? When Paul Krugman and Robert Reich are beside themselves with joy over the agenda of this administration, prudence, indeed, will dictate that we ready ourselves for a ferocious political battle to preserve the last vestiges of our uniquely American experiment in liberty.

We live in interesting times.