Kevin Connolly: Obama's first 100 days in context
[Kevin Connolly is the BBC's Washington correspondent.]
First will come the national report cards assessing the performance of President Barack Obama - his handling of the recession, his first appearances on the global stage and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Shortly afterwards, or even in parallel, will come the articles explaining how the 100 days benchmark is absurd, unreasonable and impossible to take seriously.
Often the two streams of thought will come from the same organisations - highlighting America's ambivalent attitudes towards the first rendezvous with judgement which each commander-in-chief traditionally faces.
Bay of Pigs
News organisations of course like the whole idea of the 100 days - as we tend to like anything which allows us to use dates and deadlines to make the news agenda easier to plan and manage.
Presidents themselves have tended to dislike and distrust the idea of being held to judgement so early in their administration.
How can we judge Barack Obama's performance in the field of public health, for example, when he has not even got around to appointing a surgeon-general yet?
President John F Kennedy even devoted a few lines of his inaugural address to an attempt to forestall any critics who were planning to draw conclusions from his first three months or so in the White House - an interesting example of Mr Kennedy's obsession with manipulating the media.
He tried to make the sure the parameters of judgement were thrown as wide as possible too - warning that what he wanted to accomplish might not be achieved "within a hundred days, a thousand days, or even during our lifetimes on this earth".
It did not do him any good of course.
When we remember President Kennedy, we recall the doomed glamour and the efforts on civil rights - but we also remember the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained Cuban exiles which came within his 100 days and helped shape America's view of his competence.
In American politics, the concept of the 100 days dates back directly to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who took over in the depths of the Great Depression and eventually led his country not just back to prosperity but to victory in the Second World War and global dominance too.
He called Congress into emergency session and pushed through a string of 15 major pieces of legislation to deal with rising unemployment and a paralysis of the financial system caused by the greed and folly of the nation's bankers (sounding familiar?).
When that first burst of legislative energy had been expended, it is said, FDR noticed that it had taken exactly 100 days.
Those measures included a number of sure-fire crowd-pleasers, like the legalisation of beer sales of course, and they have set a kind of gold standard of confident, rapid political action against which every subsequent president has been judged.
Finishing badly
Interestingly, by the way, the actual concept of the 100 days is both much older and much less auspicious than Americans might think...
Read entire article at BBC
First will come the national report cards assessing the performance of President Barack Obama - his handling of the recession, his first appearances on the global stage and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Shortly afterwards, or even in parallel, will come the articles explaining how the 100 days benchmark is absurd, unreasonable and impossible to take seriously.
Often the two streams of thought will come from the same organisations - highlighting America's ambivalent attitudes towards the first rendezvous with judgement which each commander-in-chief traditionally faces.
Bay of Pigs
News organisations of course like the whole idea of the 100 days - as we tend to like anything which allows us to use dates and deadlines to make the news agenda easier to plan and manage.
Presidents themselves have tended to dislike and distrust the idea of being held to judgement so early in their administration.
How can we judge Barack Obama's performance in the field of public health, for example, when he has not even got around to appointing a surgeon-general yet?
President John F Kennedy even devoted a few lines of his inaugural address to an attempt to forestall any critics who were planning to draw conclusions from his first three months or so in the White House - an interesting example of Mr Kennedy's obsession with manipulating the media.
He tried to make the sure the parameters of judgement were thrown as wide as possible too - warning that what he wanted to accomplish might not be achieved "within a hundred days, a thousand days, or even during our lifetimes on this earth".
It did not do him any good of course.
When we remember President Kennedy, we recall the doomed glamour and the efforts on civil rights - but we also remember the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained Cuban exiles which came within his 100 days and helped shape America's view of his competence.
In American politics, the concept of the 100 days dates back directly to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Democrat who took over in the depths of the Great Depression and eventually led his country not just back to prosperity but to victory in the Second World War and global dominance too.
He called Congress into emergency session and pushed through a string of 15 major pieces of legislation to deal with rising unemployment and a paralysis of the financial system caused by the greed and folly of the nation's bankers (sounding familiar?).
When that first burst of legislative energy had been expended, it is said, FDR noticed that it had taken exactly 100 days.
Those measures included a number of sure-fire crowd-pleasers, like the legalisation of beer sales of course, and they have set a kind of gold standard of confident, rapid political action against which every subsequent president has been judged.
Finishing badly
Interestingly, by the way, the actual concept of the 100 days is both much older and much less auspicious than Americans might think...