In the five years David Cameron spent rebuilding the Conservative Party in opposition, opinion polls showed that as he sought to rebrand it by offering a compassionate but persistently fuzzy image, voters had trouble defining what sort of a prime minister he would make. Not any longer. After 10 weeks in office, Cameron, who met with President Barack Obama in Washington on Tuesday, has emerged as one of the most activist prime ministers in modern times, rivaling in some respects even Margaret Thatcher, the 'Iron Lady' who as the Conservative leader in the 1980s attacked unions and government bloat while privatizing national industries and vigorously pursuing free-market policies. With a relentless battery of policy announcements, Cameron and his coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats have proposed to couple the deep deficit cuts the conservatives sketched out during the May general election campaign with a wider effort to break the mold of big government in Britain that, despite Thatcher's best efforts, has largely prevailed since World War II. In so doing, they have charted an economic course of almost savage austerity, an approach that contrasts starkly with the policies of Obama, who wrote to Cameron and other leaders last month warning against premature cuts in government spending that might drive the world into a double-dip recession. In a radio interview with NPR before going to the White House, Cameron expressed his viewpoint diplomatically. 'Every country has to deal with its budget deficit, but the time at which we do it can vary,' he said. And vary significantly, as Cameron's government has shown. A budget last month proposed an austerity campaign of extraordinary severity, setting across-the-board cuts over the next five years of 25 percent and more. But that has proved to be only the scene-setter for an ambitious -- and politically risky -- bid to dismantle Britain's sprawling bureaucracy. If successful, it will lift what the new leaders say is the state's heavy hand on public life, restricting its reach into schools and hospitals, slashing welfare benefits and reviewing intrusive law-and-order Labour programs that have alarmed advocates for civil liberties. The government's proposals for slashing spending go beyond anything Britain has experienced in its modern history, even under Thatcher. The main hallmark of the program is a plan to halve the annual budget deficit of $235 billion within five years and to achieve that by across-the-board cuts in almost all government ministries. 