My dream Obama would nurture investment in three ways. First, he would take spending that currently goes to the affluent elderly and redirect it to the young and the struggling. He would build on the means-testing Medicare idea that Yuval Levin described recently in The Times. Older people with higher lifetime earnings would have fewer benefits, and they wouldn’t kick in until age 70.

That money could be used to reduce our children’s debt burden and to fund early education, community colleges, research and infrastructure projects. President Obama thinks the Democratic base would reject this shift. I’m not so sure. Democratic interest groups generally care more about discretionary spending than entitlement spending for the affluent. Moreover, I think Republicans could be persuaded that it’s crazy to harp on discretionary spending, which is a deficit sideshow. They should focus their energies on entitlements.

Second, Obama could nurture investment by starting a debate on the sort of consumption tax plan Michael Graetz describes in his book “100 Million Unnecessary Returns”: Enact a value-added tax, use money from that tax to finance an income tax exemption of $100,000, cut the corporate tax rate to 15 percent, replace the earned-income tax credit with payroll tax relief and debit cards.

This is a heavy lift politically, but it achieves Obama’s fairness goals while boosting growth.

Third, Obama could talk obsessively about family structure and social repair. Every week we get another statistic showing how social and income inequality is dividing the nation. A team led by Robert Putnam of Harvard recently completed research showing that while childhood obesity is falling among kids whose parents graduated from college, it is still rising among kids whose parents have a high school degree or less.

Because of his upbringing, President Obama is uniquely qualified to talk about family structures. Traditional values are an investment in the young, and he could do what he can to restitch the social fabric. If we don’t address this problem, inequality will be worse 30 years from now no matter what else we do.

My dream Obama wouldn’t be just one gladiator in the zero-sum budget wars. He’d transform the sequester fight by changing the categories that undergird it. He’d possess the primary ingredient of political greatness: imagination. The great presidents, like Teddy Roosevelt, see situations differently. They ask different questions. History pivots around their terms.