WASHINGTON » With the Senate's passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation's educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Barack Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that would tighten Wall Street's rules and probably shrink its profit margins.

If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the last 35 years.

It is far too early to know if these efforts will work. Their success depends enormously on execution and, in the case of financial regulation, specifically on the Federal Reserve, which did not distinguishitself during the housing bubble.

Already, though, one downside to the legislative spurt does seem clear. By focusing on long-term problems, Obama and the Democrats have given less than their full attention to the economy's current weakness and turned offa good number of voters.

After months of discussion, and with the unemployment rate hovering near a 27-year high, Democratic leaders said Thursday they had finally reached agreement on a bill that would send aid to states and take other steps to increase job growth. Congress plans to vote on the bill next week. But some of the money will not be spent for months and may not be enough to affect voters' attitudes before November's midterm elections.

Still, the turnabout since Jan. 20—the first anniversary of Obama's inauguration and the day after Scott Brown, a Republican, won a Senate seat in liberal Massachusetts—has been remarkable. Then, commentators pronounced the Obama presidency nearly dead. Today, he looks more like a liberal answer to Ronald Reagan.

“;If you'd asked me about this administration after Scott Brown was elected, I'd have told you it was going to fizzle into virtually nothing,”; said Theda Skocpol, the Harvard political scientist. “;Now it could easily be one of the pivotal periods in domestic policy.”; But, Skocpol added, “;It will depend on what happens in the next two elections.”;

The recent period surely will not match the impact of the New Deal. Nothing is likely to, notes David Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, because the New Deal created much of the modern American government. “;These are not as dramatic as the foundational moments,”; Kennedy said, “;but they're significant changes.”;

Alan Brinkley, a historian of the Depression, added: “;This is not the New Deal, but it's a significant series of achievements. And given the difficulty of getting anything done under the gridlock of Congress, it's pretty surprising.”;

The last 16 months seem most similar in scope to three other periods in the last 80 years. After World War II, the federal government helped build the modern middle class with the GI Bill, housing subsidies, the highway system and incentives for employers to offer health insurance. The 1960s—mostly under Johnson, but also Richard Nixon—brought civil rights legislation, Medicare, Medicaid and environmental laws. Then Reagan ushered in a period that continued, more or less, until 2008: tax cuts, less regulation and other attempts to unleash the competitive forces of the market.

Obama has been trying to reverse the Reagan thrust in some important ways. Although the Reagan administration did not shrink the size of the federal government, it changed the ways that Washington collected and spent its money, by reducing taxes on the affluent, cutting some social programs and increasing military spending.

These policies ended up magnifying income inequality, which was already rising for other reasons. Since 1980, median household income has risen only 30 percent, adjusted for inflation, while average incomes at the top have tripled or quadrupled. Every major piece of the Obama agenda is meant, in part, to push back against inequality. Government may grow, but the bigger change will be how the government is spending its money.

The health bill expanded insurance coverage largely for middle-class and poor families and paid some of the bill by taxing households making more than $250,000 a year. Attached to the final health bill were also education provisions that cut subsidies to banks making student loans, and used much of the money for college financial aid instead.

The financial regulation bill, meanwhile, would take several steps likely to reduce Wall Street's profits—and Wall Street has created more multimillionaires in recent decades than any other industry. To take one example, certain trades would be forced onto open exchanges. This would hurt financial firms' ability to act as a middleman, much as Expedia and other travel Web sites have hurt travel agents.

For all these differences, though, there are also ways that Obama and today's Democrats have accepted, and are even furthering, the Reagan project. They are not trying to raise tax rates on the affluent to anywhere near their pre-1981 levels. Their health bill tried created new private insurance markets, not expand Medicare.

Most striking, the administration is trying to improve public education by introducing more market competition. To win stimulus funds, about 20 states have changed their rules to allow more charter schools or to evaluate teachers in new ways. On Thursday, Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado signed a bill that would reward teachers who received strong evaluations and deny tenure to some who did poorly.

These education changes—combined with increased spending on science research—are meant to lift economic growth. Economists have long considered education and technology to be the main ingredients in growth. In Obama's phrasing, the goal is to create a “;new foundation,”; more solid than the bubbles of recent years.

Even with those bubbles, the nation's economic output expanded only 20 percent from 2000 through 2009. In the 1980s, it grew 35 percent, and in the 1990s, it grew 37 percent.

Will this new progressive project succeed? There are any number of uncertainties: whether enough charter schools will succeed, whether the new health insurance markets will function well, whether the Fed will learn to become an effective regulator of Wall Street.

Some of those questions won't be resolved for years. But one issue should become clear much sooner. Reagan, Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt cemented their changes by retaining enough allies in Congress and serving more than four years in the White House. Obama has yet to do so.