With the economy looking bleaker by the week, it has seemed as if Barack Obama might have to wait on some of the ambitious initiatives he proposed during his campaign, such as attacking global warming and pursuing national health insurance. The massive government spending the president-elect has prescribed for the recession, though, has given liberal and environmental activists hope that in stimulating the economy he might still carry out some of these projects.

“Let no crisis go to waste,” says Robert Borosage, president of the Institute for America’s Future. A leading liberal who’s long pushed for universal health care and government spending to encourage renewable energy, Borosage says that now is the perfect time to pursue such goals.

HEAT IS ON: Solar projects like this one in California would get a boost from green economy initiatives. (BLOOMBERG NEWS / FPL GROUP INC.)

After all, Obama seems to have little to fear, at least in the short run, from Republicans or fiscally conservative Democrats in the House, called “Blue Dogs,” all of whom appear eager to get the economy moving and willing to wink at the rule, called pay-as-you-go, that requires revenue to offset government spending.

“There will be, on some of the emergency situations to stabilize the economy, the need to wave the PAYGO rule, and we will take them one at a time,” says Rep. Charlie Melancon , the Louisiana Democrat who is the new spokesman for the Blue Dogs. His group’s fear, Melancon says, is that if “we put money out there and also try to find ways to tax somebody, it might negate the stimulus.”

That’s music to Borosage’s ears. Last month he teamed with labor unions and liberal academics on a report calling for a stimulus of no less than $900 billion. Obama adviser David Axelrod said last week that the president-elect was considering a package in the range of $675 billion to $775 billion.

Under the plan devised by Borosage and the union leaders, funds would be divvied up among a variety of traditionally liberal causes, in addition to infrastructure investments and aid to states. For instance, they propose spending $100 billion on “green investments” such as expanded mass transit and wind and solar power projects; $80 billion for education; $70 billion to expand health care programs for the poor; and $80 billion toward reducing poverty.

Notably, the report casts the new spending as “not only the morally right thing to do” but also the approach that “makes the most economic sense,” citing data from Moody’s Economy.com that asserts that each dollar in tax relief to a low-income family increases the gross domestic product by $1.29.

This broader concept of stimulus is necessary, the advocates say, because past stimulus efforts, such as last year’s income tax rebates, were designed to be “targeted, temporary and timely” but did little to reshape an economy built, in their view, on asset bubbles and borrowed money.

“Economic recovery in an existential crisis like this means actually building a new economy,” says University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith, the son of John Kenneth Galbraith and one of the report’s signers. “For that, we need investment — to restore our roads, rails, transit, broadband, and water systems, to build parks and museums and libraries, to protect the environment.”

It’s a point of view that conservatives — needless to say — reject, arguing that such projects are at best inefficient stimuli. But they see little chance to stop the momentum. “This crisis is a liberal’s dream,” says Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Norquist says he worries that President Bush, in signing on to last year’s bailouts for the banking and automobile industries, “left the bank vault unlocked.”

Conservatives’ best hope for a resurgence, says Dick Armey, the former House Republican leader from Texas who now runs the conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks, is simply to wait out a stimulus plan they fully expect to fail. “Obama’s going to have a mile of slack,” Armey says. “And the Democrats are pretty well settled in their mind that the way out of a dilemma caused by irresponsible credit is to have further irresponsible use of credit.”