Deep in the Arabian desert, hundreds of guests celebrate the birth of a city.  The Saudi government has flown them in on chartered planes to the northern city of Hail, then driven them for about half an hour in buses with police escorts to a giant marquee in the sand with a red carpet out front.

President Barack Obama, in less than five months in office, kicked out the head of General Motors Corp., (GM)scored a majority stake in Chrysler Llc. for the United Auto Workers, and stiffened US fuel-mileage standards.  If pushing GM into the largest bankruptcy of a US manufacturer in history wasn’t enough for a first year in office, the 47-year-old president also aims to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and increase health-care spending by $634 billion. His administration is proposing rules for the $592 trillion over-the-counter derivatives market and standards aligning bank executives’ pay with long-term performance.

Obama is echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression by using his electoral mandate and a Democrat-dominated Congress to reverse the deepest US recession in five decades, said Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

 “You had an economic earthquake that produced the opportunity for Roosevelt to do what he did,” said Sabato, director of the school’s Center for Politics in Charlottesville, Virginia. “And you had an economic earthquake that has produced the opportunity for Obama. If a president gets 75 percent of the big items he wants, it’s historic. I believe Obama is on track to do just that.”

The financial crisis, which started with the collapse of the US property market in 2007, has triggered about $1.48 trillion of writedowns and credit losses at banks and other financial institutions, and sent the global economy into its first recession since World War II, Bloomberg data show.

In response, the US government and the Federal Reserve pledged to lend, spend or commit $12.8 trillion as of March 31 to thaw frozen credit markets, bolster investor confidence and revive consumer expenditures, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Even so, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy on April 30 and GM followed on June 1. The president’s auto task force ousted former GM chief executive officer Rick Wagoner in March after rejecting his recovery plan for the 100-year-old automaker.

The Detroit-based company had been surviving on $19.4 billion in federal loans after losing almost $88 billion since the end of 2004. The US government will take a 60.8-percent stake in GM and lend it an additional $30 billion.

White House spokesman Bill Burton didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Obama’s other initiatives are drawing opposition. Eighty-two companies, trade groups and firms had registered to lobby on climate- change legislation by mid-May—four times more than had signed up for a bill that will help unions recruit workers. The Washington-based US Chamber of Commerce, which calls itself the biggest American business lobby, is targeting lawmakers from 16 energy-producing and manufacturing states.

Democrats pushed a measure through the House Energy and Commerce Committee on May 21 that would lower carbon-dioxide emissions 17 percent by 2020 and more than 80 percent by 2050 from the 2005 level, according to the committee web site. The president called the bill an “historic” step toward “delivering on the promise of a new clean-energy economy,” according to a statement from the White House last month.

The 11,000-member National Association of Manufacturers, also in Washington, is criticizing the administration’s budget and tax proposals. The plans may cause factory owners to hold back on investments and delay economic recovery, said John Engler, the group’s president, in an interview last month.

General Electric Co. (GE) ex-CEO Jack Welch characterized companies taking federal money as making “a deal with the devil” during an interview last month. The loans and warrants banks have accepted give the government additional power over business decisions, he said.

 “The interventions are becoming more intrusive and seemingly capricious, whether they are about employee compensation, the priority of debt holders or the CEO,” said John B. Taylor, a Stanford University economics professor, at a May 12 conference in Jekyll Island, Georgia. He was a Treasury official under George W. Bush.

In an interview with Bloomberg last month, Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who crafted the climate-change legislation to limit carbon emissions, likened the lobbying to the campaign waged against Bill Clinton’s health-care overhaul in 1993.

That effort eventually killed off proposals for a single-payer insurance system and led then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to step out of policymaking.

Obama’s 52.9 percent of the popular vote puts him well ahead of Clinton’s 43 percent and makes him less vulnerable to the lobbying, said Sabato, author of The Year of Obama: How Barack Obama Won the White House (Longman, 304 pages). Among Democrats since 1860, his mandate is surpassed only by FDR’s four victories and Lyndon B. Johnson’s election in 1964, he said.

Democrats in Congress, after being out of power from 1995 to 2006, are less likely to desert the president as they did Clinton, Sabato said. Like Roosevelt, Obama has “swollen Democratic majorities” in both chambers and a public hungry for change, he said.

 “He is in the catbird seat,” Sabato said.

The administration has been willing to modify proposals to reflect the desires of the business community. In executive compensation, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner ruled out setting specific caps on pay, as congressional legislation did as part of the bailout. He also backed proposals by the nation’s largest banks requiring all market participants in over-the-counter derivatives to adhere to the same capital requirements.

 “The government is like a referee in a sports match: The players argue with him, but they don’t want him to leave the game,” said Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “Capitalism needs a government component to set the rules, and the business community in its heart of hearts knows this.”

Obama’s economic agenda-setting was greeted through June 1 by the best 58-day gain in the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 Index since 1982. The S&P has jumped 39 percent from a 12-year low on March 9. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has climbed 34 percent since then. Health-care stocks began underperforming other sectors in late March, the same month that the president began to push his agenda.

The difference between the average yield on investment- grade corporate bonds and US Treasuries fell to 356 basis points on June 5, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s US Corporate Master index. That is the lowest since September 12, when the spread was 344, the data show. Three days later when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt, it was 380 basis points. A basis point is 0.01 percentage point.

Business opposition to Obama’s plans “is the same sort of thing we heard in the first year of the Clinton administration, and that marked the beginning of an investment boom,” said Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, economics professor at Columbia University in New York.

Jeffrey Immelt, Welch’s successor at GE, is positioning his Fairfield, Connecticut-based company to take advantage of the current once-in-a-generation “reset” of the government’s role in the economy, he told investors at the April annual meeting in Orlando, Florida.

GE is hoping to serve customers who receive money from the $787-billion federal stimulus plan, signed by Obama in February, with sales of meters to make electrical distribution more efficient, wind turbines and electronic medical record systems.

The company also is applying for Department of Energy stimulus funds to help build a battery factory near Albany, New York. The sodium-based chemical technology in the batteries, which GE spent $150 million to develop, will be used in hybrid locomotives and represents a new business for the world’s biggest maker of the equipment.

 “We’ve got to have some strong industries that are able to create exports,” Immelt said in an interview. He supports the legislation on carbon emissions, seeing it as an opportunity to stir utilities’ demand for energy-efficient products, he said.

Yale’s Shiller said Obama hasn’t intervened enough, given the gravity of the nation’s economic problems.

 “So far he has just been managing the bailout and the immediate crisis,” he said. “I’ve seen little that has been done that has fundamentally changed the way we do business or finance homes.”

He said he would like Obama to “rethink” home mortgages, similar to the way Roosevelt helped create 15-year fixed-rate financing to replace the three- to five-year loans used at the time.

 “I was hoping we could use this opportunity to build a better capitalism,” Shiller said.

Apple Inc. introduced a faster model of the iPhone and cut the price of its current version, responding to fresh competition from Research In Motion Ltd. and Palm Inc.’s Pre.  A new model called the iPhone 3G S opens applications and Web pages up to twice as fast as the current version, Apple said at its developers’ conference in San Francisco on Monday. Senior vice president Phil Schiller acted as master of ceremonies at the event, stepping in for chief executive officer Steve Jobs.