Obama’s first 100 days How should Barack Obama’s early days in the White House be rated? We at the Salzburg Global Seminar asked a panel of experts to grade his fledgling administration’s performance from A+ to F based on eight tests we set in November. Is President Obama an average student or top of the class?
‘Go big’ in the inaugural address. On our first test, Theodore Sorensen, who helped to write President Kennedy’s inaugural speech in 1961, gave Mr Obama a solid A. The president “went big” on all three of the objectives we had singled out: a call to the world to meet the financial crisis together, plus pledges to work for global nuclear disarmament and negotiate a binding global treaty to stop catastrophic climate change. Crucially, he hit each objective “without unrealistically promising that any of them would be accomplished in his first 100 days”.
