Keepingitreal

Obama's First 100 Days

Will Obama Ride Reagan’s Ratings Roller Coaster?

Despite a long, hard-fought election campaign, the public rallies to a new chief executive who has come to office riding a tide of national discontent and strong disapproval of his predecessor. His approval ratings remain high even as he proposes a dramatic new approach to the role of government that has many doubters. Surveys find that Americans think the president’s plan to rescue the nation’s troubled economy will work, yet many are fearful of key provisions. Indeed, the polls find the president more personally popular than his programs. Further, a wide partisan gap exists in attitudes toward the nation’s new leader. The new president described above is, of course, Barack Obama — but, to a startling degree, it is also Ronald Reagan. A close look at Gallup’s polling of reactions to Reagan’s first few months in office provides striking parallels with what Pew Research Center polls now find about opinions of Mr. Obama. And a consideration of the Reagan experience may well give some clues as to what lies ahead for the 44th president. The public’s bottom lines on Presidents Reagan and Obama early in their presidencies have so far been quite comparable: 60 percent and 59 percent of the public approved of the new presidents in mid-March, respectively. (Going into April, the lines diverge as a sympathetic public response to the March 31 attempt on Reagan’s life boosted his numbers, at least for short period.) The parallels in the two presidents’ ratings go beyond overall results. Both were extremely popular among members of their own party, but each set off alarm bells among the opposition. Some 87 percent of Republicans approved of Reagan, while 88 percent of Democrats approve of Barack Obama. But both presidents evoked less positive opinion from the opposition than had their predecessor. Only 41 percent of Democrats approved of Reagan whereas 56 percent of Republicans had approved of Jimmy Carter in March 1977. President Obama scores only a 27 percent rating among Republicans, significantly lower than George W. Bush’s 36 percent approval score among Democrats in March 2001. No small part of the polarized reaction to both new presidents is that each made proposals that went to the core precepts about government held by the two political parties. Reagan’s expressed desire to shrink government was as much an anathema to Democrats as Mr. Obama’s proposals to increase the size and influence of government are to Republicans. In May 1981, half of Democrats believed that Reagan’s budget cuts were too large, compared with just 15 percent of Republicans. These reactions are very similar to those evoked by any number of Obama administration proposals. For example, in March 81 percent of Democrats favored the stimulus package, while 67 percent of Republicans opposed it. And while an overwhelming majority of Republicans — 70 percent — said that Mr. Obama had proposed too much spending to address the economic situation, just 17 percent of Democrats agreed. CONTINUE READING...

Obama Starts Reversing Bush Policies

President Obama moved swiftly yesterday to begin rolling back eight years of his predecessor's policies, ordering tough new ethics rules and preparing to issue an order closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has been at the center of the debate over the treatment of U.S. prisoners in the battle against terrorism. Acting to address several promises he made during his campaign, Obama met with top generals about speeding the withdrawal from Iraq and gathered his senior economic advisers as he continued to push for a massive spending bill to create jobs. He also signed a series of executive orders and directives intended to slow the revolving door between government service and lobbying, and ordered his administration to share information more freely with the public. Today, he will issue another order calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year, an immediate case-by-case review of the 245 detainees remaining there, and the application of new rules governing the treatment and interrogation of prisoners, including compliance with international treaties that the Bush administration deemed inapplicable to suspects in terrorism cases. Just hours after his inauguration Tuesday, Obama ordered the suspension of all judicial proceedings at Guantanamo Bay under the auspices of the Bush administration's military commissions system. What is to be done with the prisoners will be part of the review, sources said. Listed options include repatriation to their home nations or a willing third country, civil trials in this country, or a special civil or military system. Prisoners are to be released or transferred on a rolling basis as soon as individual cases are reviewed and determinations made as to whether the detainees can and should be prosecuted, and where.

White House counsel Gregory B. Craig, who has spent the past several weeks drafting the orders, and discussed them with senior Democratic lawmakers in recent days, briefed House Republicans on Capitol Hill yesterday. Rep. C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) said Craig told members of Congress to expect "several" executive orders on Guantanamo Bay, including closure of the prison, but did not provide specific language. House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement that "there are important questions that must be answered before the terrorist detainee facility at Guantanamo Bay can be closed. The key question is where do you put these terrorists?"Sources familiar with the briefings said Obama also will sign two executive orders altering CIA detention and interrogation rules, limiting interrogation standards in all U.S. facilities worldwide to those outlined in the Army Field Manual, and prohibiting the agency from secretly holding terrorist detainees in third-country prisons.SOURCE: NYTIMES.COM

Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past.Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking."It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.In many ways, the move into the White House resembled a first day at school: Advisers wandered the halls, looking for their offices. Aides spent hours in orientation, learning such things as government ethics rules as well as how their paychecks will be delivered. And everyone filled out a seemingly endless pile of paperwork.There were plenty of first-day glitches, too, as calls to many lines in the West Wing were met with a busy signal all morning and those to the main White House switchboard were greeted by a recording, redirecting callers to the presidential Web site. A number of reporters were also shut out of the White House because of lost security clearance lists.By late evening, the vaunted new White House Web site did not offer any updated posts about President Obama's busy first day on the job, which included an inaugural prayer service, an open house with the public, and meetings with his economic and national security teams.Nor did the site reflect the transparency Obama promised to deliver. "The President has not yet issued any executive orders," it stated hours after Obama issued executive orders to tighten ethics rules, enhance Freedom of Information Act rules and freeze the salaries of White House officials who earn more than $100,000.The site was updated for the first time last night, when information on the executive orders was added. But there were still no pool reports or blog entries.No one could quite explain the problem -- but they swore it would be fixed.One member of the White House new-media team came to work on Tuesday, right after the swearing-in ceremony, only to discover that it was impossible to know which programs could be updated, or even which computers could be used for which purposes. The team members, accustomed to working on Macintoshes, found computers outfitted with six-year-old versions of Microsoft software. Laptops were scarce, assigned to only a few people in the West Wing. The team was left struggling to put closed captions on online videos.Senior advisers chafed at the new arrangements, which severely limit mobility -- partly by tradition but also for security reasons and to ensure that all official work is preserved under the Presidential Records Act. SOURCE:WASHINGTONPOST.COM