As I sat watching President Barack Obama’s 100 days press conference I realised, after only a few minutes, I was bored. What a wonderful feeling. It’s not something I have experienced for many years when contemplating the government of the United States. Every time I began to feel twitches of irritation or anxiety or engagement, the president soothed them away with a flow of reasoned and unemotional responses. The one network that decided not to run the press conference beat the president in the ratings with a drama. That said a lot. Obama is no drama.
That seems to me to be the upshot of his first 100 days. It is far too soon to know if his strategy of easing the banks out of their toxic assets will work, if his recasting of America’s image abroad will result in real changes for the better, if his decision to expose the torture policies of the past without aggressively seeking accountability will hold up over time. It’s too soon to know if he will secure healthcare reform in this Congress, or if he can get his carbon trading bill and immigration reform passed. Events, dear reader, events have yet to have their say. But there does seem to be a palpable shift in the underlying shape of American politics three months in. Almost all of it is in Obama’s direction.
The polling tells you something important. His approval ratings have actually gone up since he took office. Take away the party labels and, in the latest Gallup poll, Obama is winning the support of 90% of liberals with 7% against but, much more significantly, he is winning self-described “moderates” by a massive 73% to 19%. Even conservatives are split on him — with 42% approving and 53% disapproving; 41% of weekly church-goers approved of him just before the election — and now that number has risen to 57%. That’s a direct hit at the core Republican appeal.
In the critical battle for image and comfort, Obama has trounced his opponents without aggressively attacking them. And they have done themselves in, to a large extent, by prematurely attacking him. Few events revealed this as starkly as the veteran Republican senator Arlen Specter’s decision last week to become a Democrat.
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