Word: roosevelts
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Franklin D. Roosevelt's critics once tried to get at him through his dog, Fala, claiming the Navy had been dispatched, at great public expense, after Fala was supposedly left behind on a remote island. The attack backfired--the GOP hadn't factored in the popularity of a pooch with his own secretary to answer fan mail. America is canine-crazy, which is why a President's best friend can sometimes be the only one he needs...
...five pillars - new rules for Wall Street, new initiatives in education, alternative energy and health care, and eventually budget savings that would bring down the national debt - which did sound a bit prosaic. Democratic politicians have been promising one or another, if not all, of the above since Franklin Roosevelt reinvented American government in the 1930s. But Obama was making his case in the midst of a national crisis, at a moment when it seemed possible that he might enact much of what he was seeking. And he was talking about far more than a new set of policies...
...idea that a President can be assessed in a mere 100 days is a journalistic conceit. Most presidencies evolve too slowly to be judged so quickly. Roosevelt set the initial standard in 1933, overpowering Congress and passing a slew of legislation to confront the Great Depression during his first three months in office. "Lyndon Johnson had two 100-days periods," says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "one after the Kennedy assassination and another after he was elected in 1964." Indeed, Johnson's legislative haul dwarfs anything before or since; he quickly got Congress on track to pass landmark civil rights bills...
...assets that many banks have on their books, a plan to bail out the auto industry and a strict new regulatory regime proposed for Wall Street. Obama has also completely overhauled foreign policy, from Cuba to Afghanistan. "In a way, Obama's 100 days is even more dramatic than Roosevelt's," says Elaine Kamarck of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Roosevelt only had to deal with a domestic crisis. Obama has had to overhaul foreign policy as well, including two wars. And that's really the secret of why this has seemed so spectacular...
With the exception of Johnson's remarkable run, the few successful 100-day sprints have been a triumph of vision over substance. Roosevelt, Reagan and Obama changed the national mood more than anything else - and moods can change back quickly, especially in our overripe, overwired cable-news dystopia. As impressive a start as Obama has had, these 100 days could come to seem an overambitious and naive presage of disaster if the President's financial policies are inadequate to meet the crisis; his budget proposals are gutted by Congress; and his attempts to leave Iraq, fight in Afghanistan and negotiate...