http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2012/12/mark_steyn_obam_2....

"I think he's figured out that this is actually an opportunity for him to drive a stake through the Republican Party in which everybody's taxes will go up," Steyn said. "And the Republicans will get a blame for it. And I'm not sure he's wrong about that. I think his strategy all along -- I said this in my book, so it's weird to see it coming true so literally -- has been to establish 25 percent of GDP as the new baseline for federal spending. So, he needs everybody's taxes to go up, not just Warren Buffett's. And there's two ways he can do that. He can either get John Boehner to capitulate as John Boehner seems eager to do, or he can say the hell with it, let's go of the fiscal cliff and stick Republicans with the blame."

Steyn said this tactic is part of a broader vision that Obama is attempting to fulfill and that it was put forth by his predecessors, former Presidents Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. But he said it is much more difficult to install what he defined as "European socialism democracy" in the United States.

[...] "We're not quite the full Sweden yet, but we basically are spending like Europeans, but we're not taxed like that. And the idea that you can close that gap, I think he figures out, if he can make this level of spending permanent, he changes the United States into a European social democracy and he'll be the most consequential president of the last hundred years," Steyn continued. "He will finish the work of FDR and LBJ and that will be it. We'll be a big Sweden."
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Video at the link. I can't say that i disagree with anything he says.