[digg-reddit-me]Richard Reeves makes the observation that must underlie any evaluation of the First 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency:
[W]e know from observing the modern presidency that there may be very little relation between a president’s first 100 days and the next 1,361. The presidency is essentially a reactive job; any president — be it John F. Kennedy or Barack Obama — inevitably becomes a creature of events unforeseen.
I’ll leave the lengthy evaluations of Barack Obama’s first 100 days to others – but I would wager that the most significant accomplishment of Obama’s short time in office has not been any legislation or government programs or foreign policy – but instead his turning around of the mood of America, giving hope where these was despair.
Specifically, I am referring to a mood captured by the rise in the right track/wrong track numbers since Obama’s election and inaguration. Despite all the continued dire news, Obama has been able to somehow instill a sense of optimism in this short time. In this way, the start to his presidency has been similar to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan – who likewise took power after an unpopular president who bequeathed them a foundering economy. All turned around public opinion before anything else – and based on this, achieved their later successes.