BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

The Obama Presidency is a wonder to watch.  Barack Obama is making changes, which taken together—the sum of their parts—are transforming government and politics in disturbing ways it will take years and maybe decades to reverse.

His presidency is the triangulation of three distinct characteristics of politics and government.

First, the Obama Presidency is an Imperial Presidency, accumulating and concentrating power in the Executive like few Presidents have done before.

Second, it is a campaign Presidency, intensely focused on winning a second term, at the expense of public policy and cooperation with Congress.

Finally, it is an Administration, a collection of Cabinet departments and federal agencies which he is using to move the government and the country in a starkly different direction than in any time certainly since Reagan, and maybe Roosevelt.

The Imperial Presidency, historically, is a label applied to administrations that have taken unilateral military actions or engaged in aggressive foreign policies: James K. Polk’s intervention in Mexico; Theodore Roosevelt’s internationalism; and in more modern times, Lyndon Johnson’s expansion of our role in Vietnam or Ronald Reagan’s aid to Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

But the term is really more broadly associated with any actions of a President that could be deemed outside his constitutional authority:  Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus, Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to the League of Nations, Franklin Roosevelt’s Supreme Court stacking, or Richard Nixon’s cover-up of the Watergate break-in. It is the persistent usurpation or concentration of power by the Executive in the Executive.

That description fits the Obama Presidency like a glove.

Barack Obama has concentrated power in his presidency through federal policy czars, executive orders, federal regulations, the reallocation of appropriations, the creation of special committees and commissions, recess appointments and most recently, with his proposal for more power to reorganize commerce agencies.

They all fall somewhere in that never-never land between political expediency and constitutional over-reach. Individually, these actions haven’t made much of a stir.

But the impact of imperial presidencies can be profound. Our natural resistance to them is part of our national birthright. The colonies rebelled against an imperial crown. The Declaration of Independence is, while eloquent, a harsh rant against King George and the powers he arbitrarily assumed that eventually brought the colonies to their knees economically and politically.

The Founding Fathers believed strongly in both the separation of powers and the balance of powers among the branches of governance; but in the end, they looked to the legislature as the first line of defense against imperialism and the embodiment of the Republican form they created.

It is interesting then that the rationale on which President Obama has based his accumulation of power in the executive is his inability to work with Congress, or as he would argue, the unwillingness of Congress to work with him, summed up succinctly in one of his campaign themes:

“We can’t wait. Where they won’t act, I will.”

And that is the second hallmark of the Obama Presidency.  For months now, since the collapse of deficit reduction negotiations with House Speaker John Boehner last summer, Obama and his White House have been in full-dress, full-speed-ahead campaign mode.

The President went on a whirlwind, cross-country and cross-continent tour after the collapse of those talks. He conducted more fundraising events and visited more swing states than any of his predecessors in the comparable period. He shamelessly politicized a speech before a Joint Session of Congress to promote yet another shell for job creation that framed his re-election campaign rather than public policy. He went to Kansas to enlist the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt in his campaign and continued to stump the country elsewhere.

The White House staff has erased the lines between what is partisan and what is policy. Spokesman Jay Carney responds to Mitt Romney as though he was the spokesman of the Obama campaign or the Democratic National Committee, instead of the Executive Branch of Government.

There is nothing really new in what the President and his staff are doing. The distinctions between President and candidate for President have always been blurred and the role of the White House in governing and campaigning, confused and abused at best. But with each succeeding President, the distinctions are lost or ignored more frequently and at greater cost to the taxpayers. The Obama Presidency seems more intense, more blatantly partisan than most and it is exploiting an already unhealthy trend.

There are fewer and fewer limits to what American presidents are willing to do, to accumulate power and advance their own partisan interests and while the media like to brush it off as just part of the theater of politics, it should be of much more concern.

The accumulation of power and the partisanship come together in the third iteration of the presidency, what the Chief Executive sees as the role of the Executive Branch of Government and what imprint he wants to leave on it.

The Obama Administration is the collection of 15 Cabinet departments and more than 1,000 agencies of the federal government, which employ the 2.65 million people who are supposed to protect us and administer and enforce federal law and public policy. The Executive is a perpetual bureaucracy, but to be sure, it is also a political instrument of the person in charge.

The Obama Administration, again, is doing what other administrations have done–take power away from the Cabinet departments and concentrate it in the Executive Office of the President and empower the regulatory agencies to fulfill the President’s agenda, circumventing Congress in the process.

But, again, President Obama has lowered the bar another notch. He is transforming the bureaucracy with gusto. He inherited a conservative government and a heap of seemingly insurmountable problems, but he has turned the ship of state around, capitalizing on opportunities, particularly in his first two years,  to advance a progressive, neo-socialist domestic agenda, crowned by health care, labor and financial reforms. You can make all the noise you want about repealing health care, but the fact remains that the agenda will be sustained and cemented in place through the end of his first term. I’ve never met the guy, but the agenda seems to be at the core of who he is, why he ran in the first place and what he wants his legacy to be.

Economic vitality—job creation and growth–has been secondary to economic and social realignment (what we like to call class warfare, which according to some PEW research, the President is succeeding at); thus the 2010 election results and the significant threat to his re-election.

That in the end will be the sum and substance of the Obama Presidency and its ultimate downfall, a failure to do what is most basic, most elemental in our system of governance—conducting the people’s business, not yours.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.