The agenda that President Obama has put on the table represents "the biggest change in Washington in any of our lives," Republican bigfoot Vin Weber told a Humphrey Institute audience Thursday afternoon.

Weber, a former Minnesota congressman turned very successful lobbyist and Republican insider, says he sees merit in several of Obama's initiatives, and hopes that they succeed. But the key question he raised, in policy area after area, is: What happens if they don't? It's a fair question and Weber, a conservative Repub insider who has the gift of talking about public affairs in tones that don't make liberals and Dems want to run screaming from the room, didn't answer the question. But by avoiding the hyperpartisan rhetoric that tends to fill the airwaves, Weber succeeded in getting a small audience on a sunny Thursday afternoon to think down the road, past the euphoria many liberals feel about Obama's magical personna, to some serious questions the administration and the nation may face a year or so down the road.

A couple of examples to illustrate the main message:

On the Arab-Israeli conflict: Obama has committed to bringing U.S. pressure for a settlement to the 60-year-old argument. He has done so not at the end of his term, as other recent presidents have done, but at the beginning. He has changed the traditional U.S. starting point -- that the security of Israel is the fundamental priority -- and made the achievement of a two-state solution the top priority. Obamaians, he said, point out that the old approach had been tried and tried and wasn't getting results.

Weber said, as he did on many of these topics, that he favors the approach. Former Sen. George Mitchell is a great choice for special envoy. Obama has "drawn a line in the sand" by declaring U.S. opposition to any expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a hard-liner with even more hard-line elements of his coalition who may bolt at any sign of retreat. Obama has put his own credibility on the line over settlement expansion. "Suppose Netanyahu says no," Weber asked. "What is the president going to do?" A fair question to which, one hopes, someone on Team Obama has an answer, even if they won't divulge it for a while.

On Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan: More than any other issue, Weber believes Obama owed his electoral success last year to his promise to end the war in Iraq. The Dem base preferred Obama to other major candidates on the issue because he had opposed the war from the beginning. But the base was less enthusiastic about Obama's frequent commitment to increase U.S. troop strength (Weber said the Obama message-team has gone to some pains never to call it a "surge") in Afghanistan.

Weber thinks Richard Holbrooke is a great choice for envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there is plenty of reason to be concerned that violence will increase in Iraq as the U.S. troops depart, that the additional troops in Afghanistan will be unable to pacify that situation, which has defeated all outsiders who have attempted to pacify it for centuries, and that the presence of both nuclear weapons and the Taliban in Pakistan will continue to present apocalyptic possibilities.

Most likely of all, Weber predicted, is that the left will not stick with Obama on that policy the way the right stuck with Bush on Iraq. What will Obama do if Iraq bleeds, Afghanistan quagmires and Pakistan wobbles (or worse than wobbles)?

The Iran dilemma: Obama has assigned Weber's friend (and veteran Mideast diplomat) Dennis Ross to the new policy of "engagement" with Iran. Searching for accommodations that are consistent with both nations' "interests" makes sense, Weber said. He isn't repeating the normal Republican rhetoric about the evils of talking to Iran. But the initiative is still rooted in U.S. insistence that Iran forswear its nuclear program. What will Obama do if engagement doesn't get results, specifically on nuclear questions? And even if it does, Weber said, Arab nations, including U.S. allies, don't want the Mideast to become a two-power region, divided between the "interests" of the Americans and the Iranians. Has Obama prepared for the possibility that improvements in U.S.-Iran relations will come at the expense of U.S.-Arab relations?

What are the limits of the Keynesian revival? Weber asked. On domestic and economic issues, Weber said he recalled that when he came to Washington in 1981 as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution, critics often remarked that Reagan was "betting the farm" on the "supply-side" theory of economics. Maybe so. But that pales compared to the degree that Obama has bet the farm on Keynesian economic theory (which, he acknowledged, is older and more established than supply-side-ism, but "still just a theory.")

In other words, is there a limit to the U.S. government's ability to borrow and spend to revive the economy? Current levels of debt and deficit are unprecedented since World War II. The theory that eventually a national debt of sufficient size will set off serious inflation has not been repealed and Obama claims to have his long-term eyes on the potential problem.

Weber said he has heard Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke say that the Federal Reserve system has tools and techniques to deal with such a problem, but he hasn't heard Bernanke specify that the tools involve raising interest rates and squeezing the money supply, which will almost certainly drive the economy back into recession.

The same with what Weber called "the largest expansion in the role of government in our history." Suddenly (and he would eventually acknowledges that this process started under Bush, with AIG, etc.) the federal government has a huge ownership stake in major banks, insurance firms, and now auto companies. Like it or not, the most successful products made by GM and Chrysler over recent years were SUVs and small trucks, the kinds of vehicles that the "new owners" (meaning the federal government) seem to abhor for reasons flowing from the energy/environment policies of the administration. The second largest stakeholder in GM (behind the federal government) is the UAW, which would seem to undermine the likelihood of future savings in the area of labor costs. How realistic is it to think that the companies can return to profitability under this scenario? Weber asked. Obama has said that he has no interest in a long-term program of government ownership of these industries, but "have we figured out how we're going to back away from all of this?" A fair question.

During the Q&A with Larry Jacobs of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, Weber said that if the government ownership of those industries remains problematic, how to get rid of that ownership stake may be a big issue for whomever challenges Obama in 2012.

Under Jacobs' prodding, Weber acknowledged that Bush policies that greatly increased federal involvement in local education policy (No Child Left Behind) and a major expansion of entitlement benefits (Medicare Part D) had "delegitimized the basic Republican argument" about small government. But the increases in the role of the federal government under Obama "dwarfs all of that."

Jacobs also pushed Weber to acknowledge that the two recent tax-cutting Republican presidents, Reagan and the second Bush, had seen big increases in the deficit and undermined the claim that tax cuts lead to healthy economies. Weber wasn't buying that one. He still believes that the tax policies of the early Reagan years kicked off 25 years of prosperity and that the mistakes that have undermined that prosperity were not mistakes of excessive tax cutting.

The current fiscal crisis of California shows what happens to a state that taxes and spends, he said, and predicted that "a tax revolt is just over the horizon."

On matters of pure party politics, Jacobs asked whether Obama has cleverly helped to elevate some of the least popular Republicans -- specifically former Veep Dick Cheney and radio flamer Rush Limbaugh -- into the most prominent faces of the party, and how Republicans could escape that trap.

Weber replied that the two biggest elections in 2009 will be the races for governor in Virginia and New Jersey (the only two statewide races this year). Keep your eyes on those races, he suggested. Republicans seem to be nominating very appealing, electable candidates. And early polls suggest that the Repubs have a shot at winning both. If they do, that will be a "sign of viability" for the Republicans far more significant than the fun the Dems may have with Limbaugh.

Audio of the entire program (it's about 90 minutes) is available here.