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A few days before he was elected president, Barack Obama ranked his priorities: first an economic recovery package, then energy, then health care, followed by tax restructuring, and finally education. He seemed to be signaling a reluctance to follow the FDR “First 100 Days” model.

But recently there have been hints that the Obama administration might be set to move a little bit faster. He’s assembled an all-star economics team that will include Tim Geithner as Secretary of Treasury, Larry Summers as the director of the National Economic Council, Paul Volcker as chairman of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, as well as my personal favorite, Austan Goolsbee as another member of some sort of board. In short, all hands on deck. He’ll also have Tom Daschle heading up the health care push, Bill Richardson as Secretary of Commerce, and of course Rahm Emmanuel knocking heads together as chief of staff.

In other words, Obama has the manpower to do a few things at once.

A recent New York Times  piece suggested he may do just that. The Times reported that Democrats in Congress are preparing several bills for Obama to sign the day he takes office. He's already proposed a stimulus plan that would include tax rebates and “creating and saving 2.5 million jobs -- jobs rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing our schools, and creating the clean energy infrastructure of the twenty-first century.”

Haven’t priorities one and two, economic recovery and energy, combined nicely?

And why not? Aren’t all these problems interconnected anyway? Take the proposed auto industry bailout. While it’s hard to deny that GM and Chrysler “deserve” to go bankrupt, now might not be the best time for that to happen, as the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of collapse. But if the U.S. does give the Big Three a $30 billion Christmas present, it might want to take the opportunity to try to fix some long-term problems for the U.S. car companies: namely, health care.

The main reason the Big Three have so much trouble competing with foreign cars isn’t that they make bad cars. It isn’t even that the workers are paid too much. It’s the massive health benefits retired autoworkers get as part of their union contracts. What better way to save the auto Industry than to reform health care in such a way that it transfers health care costs from businesses to government? Of course, the money has to come from somewhere, but it would be cheaper because the government could pool everyone it provides insurance for together. You could imagine, therefore, a business tax that would pay for health care but ultimately save companies like GM money.

The Obama administration could go about things incrementally. Expand SCHIP. Pass a little stimulus package. Conventional wisdom dictates that a president only has so much political capital, and that he can only do so much at a time.

But what if Obama did it all? Right away?

In 2004, Naomi Klein wrote an article for Harpers called “Baghdad Year Zero.” The piece detailed the Bush administration’s plan for a post-war Iraq: to obliterate all infrastructure and pave the way for private companies to swoop in and create a free-market utopia. The idea wasn’t exactly new, but a culmination of years of thinking that Klein later wrote about in her book, “The Shock Doctrine.”

Klein’s book refers to sudden free-market reforms such as privatization and free trade done under the cover of a recent disaster or crisis. However, times of crisis have always been an excuse to overhaul systems, no matter what political persuasion the overhauler belongs to. The massive reform of the New Deal, which forever changed the role of the U.S. government, was only made possible by the Great Depression. It took the Civil War to end slavery, and the Kennedy Assassination to end Jim Crow.

If America is indeed in a state of crisis, then now is the perfect time for massive reforms. Democrats, who control the House, Senate, and the White House, have both the political capital, the political manpower, and the political cover of an economic crisis to ram through everything all at once. Universal health care. Job creation. Building wind farms and nuclear power plants. You name it. Call it the reverse Shock Doctrine, Obama Year Zero. The Democrats have the ability to pass so many bills that newspapers wouldn't have room to mention them all in their headlines.

There are some issues that are too culturally divisive, that require sensitivity and consensus building, to move on right away -- for example, gays in the military, Immigration reform, and anything to do with abortion.

But most of Obama’s proposals can be dealt with immediately. And not just domestic policy, either. Obama can begin withdrawing troops from Iraq as soon as he secures a Status of Forces Agreement from the Iraqi government. He can begin to rebuild our image by starting to close Guantanamo Bay, banning torture, and taking the lead in coming to an international agreement about climate change (he most likely won’t commit to the Kyoto Protocol; he’ll probably push for something new).

Obama’s mandate comes not only from his healthy margin of victory but also from the gravity of the economic crisis. To not take full advantage of it would be to ignore the meaning of the moment.

--Hillel Aron