1. Clif Soulo wrote:

I can respect this grade as you have expressed reasoning behind each grade..unlike Hannity, who gave him an F-. smh…

2. Dan wrote:

Dr. Hill,

I agree with your Obama assessment. My wife and I didn’t vote for Obama, it was more an experience/accomplishmnt thing than anything else (rightly or wrongly, I don’t know). But, we thought if he won, having a community organizing background in Chicago, he would reach out and help the people in the inner city, and we were looking forward to watching how he made moves towards this end. But so far there’s been nothing that we can see.

Do you think he’s trying to build credibility, or “political capital’, as GW put it, and then move on the inner city front with some clout behind him? He better build it quickly because the people that got him elected are hurting. I’m know that I’m reaching here, but can’t figure it out.

The inner city folks showed-up for Obama on election day, but what’s he doing for them? I know the tax cuts, etc. might help, but money isn’t the only thing that’s needed in the inner city. I don’t know what’s needed exactly, but I run a very small business and every struggling business wants money, and usually that’s not the answer that owners think it might be. Money can buy more time, but without other factors it’s usually squandered.

I have the same, admittedly uniformed, view of the inner city situations. These good people don’t just need a check, which they need also, but big things that only the government can come in and help out with.

Obama is really disappointing me here.

I look forward to your next Factor appearance,

Dan

3. Maureen Dowd wrote:

“Facing the biggest financial crisis of our generation, the Obama administration has certainly been busy. In the first hundred days, the administration has pushed through the largest stimulus package in U.S. history, steered Chrysler and GM toward a managed reorganization, and stress tested our banking system. Treasury Secretary Geithner has floated multiple plans to rebuild Wall Street with a mixture of public and private capital. And if, as many critics have claimed, the administration’s proposed packages have not always been harsh enough to put the fear of God into wayward bankers, the administration certainly managed to scare the bejeesus out of them Monday morning with the fighter plane that buzzed Manhattan’s financial district.

It’s probably no exaggeration to say that Obama’s presidency will ultimately stand or fall on its handling of the financial crisis. And at this point, with respect to all the frantic activity, the polls seem to be saying, so far, so good. Even though a recent New York Times/CBS survey suggests that Americans don’t expect the country to be out of recession by the end of his first term, Obama’s approval ratings are in the mid-sixties.

Of course, Jimmy Carter’s early approval ratings hit 70% before beginning their long downward slide. And Bush’s ranged as high as 95% after 9/11. As the Wall Street prospectuses all say, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Still, Obama’s performance thus far ought to offer some clue: has he set the stage for economic victory, or defeat? In some sense, for all its exertions, the Obama administration hasn’t actually done all that much.

There is, to be sure, the stimulus. It is indeed large, filled with scores of spending plans, alleged to be “temporary.” Like the recently discontinued tax on telephone service — originally enacted to fund the Spanish-American War — many of these programs will undoubtedly be with us for decades to come. As of now, however, most of the stimulus money remains to be spent.

Yet while the stimulus package will provide some modest boost to aggregate demand, it in no way addresses the central problems the Obama administration faces. The Medicare and Social Security systems are about to start draining the budget, rather than contributing to it. The “stress tests” are starting to tell us what we already knew: Large parts of the banking sector need more capital, which won’t be easy to raise in the current economic environment. The recession, and especially the decline of Wall Street, is badly undercutting Federal tax revenues. All of these problems are just revealing themselves. And they will get worse before they get better.

So far, Obama’s only proposal for dealing with the funding shortage is a tax increase on high earners, leaving “95% of working families” untouched. But the math doesn’t work. In 2006, the latest year for which data are available, the top 5% of families took home a whopping 36% of national taxable income, and paid 20% of that, or around $600 billion, in Federal income tax. But even before the president’s ambitious health care plan emerges from the Congressional policy grinder, the CBO estimates that his budget plans to spend an additional $400 billion each year. He’s not going to get there with a small, or even a large, tax increase on high earners. For one thing, the share of national income collected by the top 5% has undoubtedly dropped sharply since 2006, because their incomes tend to depend more on capital and business income, and on bonuses, all of which have fallen off. (That’s why tax revenues fell off so steeply in 2001.) And work by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez suggests that the deeper the crisis, the longer and deeper the hit to top incomes: the lessening of the gap between rich and poor during the fifties and sixties may in fact have been largely attributable to the deleterious effects of the Great Depression and World War II.

Even if this weren’t the case, it’s not really feasible to pay for everything simply by doubling taxes on the wealthy — because federal income taxes aren’t the only taxes they pay. Higher incomes are disproportionately concentrated in places with high state and local taxes, like New York City. There’s a practical limit to how high a percentage of income you can take from even the wealthiest financier, not least because they have more discretion about how, and whether, they make money, which means that raising taxes above a certain level rapidly starts depressing the amount of income available to tax. Even most European countries don’t try to pay for their welfare states just by soaking the rich.

Up until now, Obama has largely done the fun part of governing: promising people free stuff. To be sure, even some of that is fairly unpopular, but the auto bailouts have undoubtedly pleased the UAW more than they have angered the rest of the population, and most of the bank spending has occurred under programs originated in the Bush administration. Now, however, the bill for Obama’s central proposals is about to come due. Unless Obama thinks he can borrow something like a trillion dollars a year indefinitely, he is going to have to ask Americans to make sacrifices to pay for the goodies.

And the taxes needed to pay for the new programs are not the only costs he will ask us to bear. Like most as yet unimplemented programs theoretically designed to make the world a better place, a cap-and-trade regime for reducing carbon emissions polls well. But when Americans actually have to start paying more for gas, electricity, and heating oil, they will not be so enthusiastic — especially if their budgets are still shrinking. And if health care is not to carry a shocking price tag, it will have to achieve some sort of savings through rationing: drug makers simply don’t make enough in profits to foot the entire bill through lower pharmaceutical prices. Richard Epstein has argued convincingly that ClintonCare foundered because most American voters have health insurance they are satisfied with. In theory, they support a government health care program–but when they are confronted by the details of how their health care will change, that support evaporates.

Neither Obama’s legacy, nor the economy’s performance, will be much affected by what has happened in these early days. The real test for both will be how he handles the tough choices ahead.”

4. Ian wrote:

And I rate YOU a “C.”

5. Logic wrote:

Wow Doc, I’d hate to be in your class.

If you really think that he deserves a C-, then I must’ve been sleep these past 100 days.

As far as Arne Duncan is concerned, I think it is a great pick. Remember, Obama is “the least qualified President of all time,” but look at the job he is doing, given the tremendous issues he has to take on. “Bad” teachers, unions, and public education needs to be assaulted, they aren’t doing a good job.

Dan, you said that you’re still waiting to see what he has done for the inner city, I think the President answered that last night! Inner city folks (read: black people) are disproportionaely affected by the issues that he is moving on. These include: limited access to healthcare, the poor economy and others.

6. Dan wrote:

Logic,

I didn’t see last nights press conference, so I’m at a loss there. I hear you about the healthcare, economic programs, etc., helping the inner city, but I guess I was looking for more of a far reaching inner city specific program from someone that was at ground zero, like Obama was for years as a state senator. I don’t think someone can wave a wand, but something more. Again, I might be totally off the mark here.

I guess if he did have an “inner city” program everyone would scream “here we go, he’s only concerned with his own people” or whatever, forgeting he’s half-white.

I say “inner city folks” because I don’t know how else to phrase it I guess, and I steal the ‘folks’ from The O’Reilly Factor. I’m a white suburban guy, but have just as many white relatives that live in the city that would benefit from the programs as that wouldn’t.

- Dan

7. Logic wrote:

Dan,

I didn’t mean to imply that you were using “inner city folks” as code for Black people, but Obama addressed this question from a Black journalist, about Black people, last night and I was trying to make the connection between your concerns and the jouranlist’s.

8. Tom Penn wrote:

I give President Obama an overall grade of A. And I give him an A+ as Commander-in-Chief.

9. DCI74 wrote:

100 days is only 6% of his total days in office so I can’t give him anything more than an incomplete. I don’t think 6% is enough time to give a reasonable grade, it would be like a high school student asking about grades after the first 11 days of class. I’ll leave the grading up to the talking heads and political pundits. I’ll wait until after his first year before attempting to grade.

10. R.oB. wrote:

Marc, this grade was like all the rest as arbitrary. I love the assault on teachers. Corporate bailouts, too. On the one hand, you’ve been highly biased. On the other, you Monday quarter back. Your rationales beg a couple of questions. How does holding teachers more accountable amount to an assault? And with respect to corporate bailouts, what exactly would you do better? (And I’m talking about the meat of the problem. Not the corporate CEO compensation media reach around which amounts to 1% of the problem!)

C- indeed! This is why I hate grading. It privileges a person’s perceptions over reality. You really think given the challenges we face that Obama is doing a below average job? Meaning that your average Joe could do better? Wow, dude. That’s not respectable. For real, for real. Now if he is doing a C- implementing your political agenda, I’d be far more sympathetic.

11. Clif Soulo wrote:

Hmmmm, Great point DC! while grading him is nice and all, in actuality, He is just getting settled in. Long, long road ahead…

12. Morbo wrote:

Generally, I agree with this. But I think you have the foreign and transportation grades reversed. The world exists beyond the Afghani borders, and Obama’s done a pretty excellent job of reaching out to it. Conversely, there wasn’t nearly enough money given to mass transit and railroads in that stimulus package (which was far from bloated) while a lot of money was tagged for highway repair, even though roads are clearly an outmoded form of transportation.

R.oB. You do realize how a grading system works, right? You don’t grade eighth graders achievements against those of third or tenth graders, but against other eighth graders. Obama is being graded not compared to “average Joes” (for whom you seem to have some contempt), but compared to other presidents. On that scale if someone like George W. Bush is a solid F and the Roosevelts are solid A, then Obama’s probably a C+.

DCI74. Your point would be more valid had so much of the campaign not centered around “ready on day one” rhetoric. He told the public he would be ready on day one, so it’s fair to hold him to that claim. Moreover, the presidency isn’t a classroom, it’s a job. I know three months into every job I’ve had I’ve been evaluated on my progress to that point.

13. DCI74 wrote:

Indeed Clif. I think people get excited because 100 is a nice number and on the surface seems to represent a significant period of time but in terms of a full presidency it barely scratches the surface. He still has more than 1300 days left of his first term so 100 days is just a drop,

14. Clif Soulo wrote:

What I find even more interesting is how bad the republicans (specifically, some of the nut jobs on fox news –minus Marc–) are getting. And if we apply the same standard to their actions/statements, can you imagine how bad it’s going to get 2, 3 months, a year from now?

I’m seriously nervous…the stuff that’s going on with fox is starting to get a little outrageous…and that’s bad, being that I expect the worst from Fox already…

15. Frichy wrote:

Dr. Hill,

The C- grade sounds about right to me for the 100 days. I do believe a reevaluation will be necessary at the one year mark because 100 days is just not enough time to obtain the most accurate grade possible. I would really like to see these government officials come up with creative solutions to the problems this country is facing though. It just seems like Obama has chosen so many politicians that have been around for so long that they are all jaded, and just marking time. Many of them seem to be slackers just there to get their paychecks and those 5 star healthcare benefits paid for by the 40 million tax payers who themselves go without healthcare. Wasn’t it his top economic advisor, Larry Summers, who was photographed sleeping at that big meeting Obama had called to discuss how the credit card companies are still ripping us off even though the banks have been given billions in bailout money. When I think about that, I might downgrade that C- to a D. I really expected Obama to bring with him a lot of young men and women burning with desire to come to Washington and really step up and get the job done. He really needs to have young, energetic folks ready to burn the midnight oil to get these problems solved. I expected to see a lot of brilliant young men and women such as yourself and that highly intelligent young women you used to write with in down from the tower or something like that. Lacewell I think was her name. Let’s hope that things get better with time.

16. Lisa wrote:

oh Come On! a C-
You’ve spent too much time listening to those blowhards on Fox, Marc. You need a list of Obama’s accomplishments? What he has done about torture, advancing women’s rights and children healthcare in 100 days gives him a B in my opinion. Not to mention we expats don’t fear for our life while we live abroad with the likes of Bush and co at the helm. You need to either leave the country for a trip or take off your Faux colored glasses.

1st 100 days
Signed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
Created White House Council on Women and Girls
Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel
Banished lobbyists from Government
Commitment to Transparency and Open Government
Transformed White House website
Initiated YouTube weekly address
Signed State Children’s Health Insurance Program
Memorandum on Presidential Signing Statements
Established White House Office of Urban Affairs
Established Chief Performance Office and Chief Technology Officer
Appointed George Mitchell special envoy to the Middle East
Traveled to Canada to discuss trade and diplomatic relations
Established President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board
Established Domestic Policy Council
Passage of Recovery Bill with stimulus to create jobs and recovery.gov to track spending and access to all
Passage of 2010 budget, instituting a more honest accounting of spending
Instituted a pay freeze for federal workers
Commitment to Clean Energy
Commitment to reform No Child Left Behind
Called for a comprehensive review and reform of DOD budget
Instituted bank stress tests
Instituted program to refinance home loans at makinghomeaffordable.gov
Conducted auto recovery review/recommendations
Called for overhauling the procurement and contracting process
Established The White House Office Of Health Reform
Put an end to torture as a policy of the United States
Plan to withdraw from Iraq
Executive Order to close Guantanamo
Transfer of Detainee to Control of the Attorney General
Major review of Afghanistan and a new plan
Removed Barriers to Stem Cell Research
Attended G20 and NATO meetings and formed new relationships to improve our security and national interests
Trip to Iraq to address the troops in Baghdad/met with Maliki
Opened up family financial support/travel to Cuba
Initiated nuclear non-proliferation talks
Commitment to high-speed rail
Commitment to improve Veteran’s benefits, including digitzing medical records
Commitment to improve border security with Mexico to stop the flow of drugs and weapons
Traveled to Mexico and Summit of the Americas
Approved California Request for Waiver Under the Clean Air Act
Charged the Economic Recovery Advisory Board with tax code reform
Handled crisis with Somali pirates
Implemented small business and student loan lending initiatives Proposed reform for the student loan process
Signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act
Initiated credit card protection legislation
Commitment to basic scientific research with funding and tax credits
Appointed a President’s Advisory Council on Science & Technology to promote scientific and technological advancement, including international cooperation
Tripled the number of fellowships in science

17. Logic wrote:

Damn Lisa, you’ve been paying attention, huh!

DC174 and Clif,
That fact that he has only been in office for 6% of his first term is irrelevant. The grading is for how he has performed during his first 100 days. We’re not grading his presidency, just the first 100 days. I think he has accomplished a lot.

18. Chanel Graham wrote:

Dr. Hill,

I find it interesting that you ignored Obama’s engagement with faith communities as a category on your report card entirely. I would give him at least B+ in that subject. Given our past administration’s emphasis on religion, yet utter incompetence at living up to the faith they professed while simultaneously excluding and offending the faith of millions of America, I think the Obama administration has done a phenomenal job.

I just returned from the Mobilization to End Poverty conference in Washington, D.C. where 1000 Christians lobbied for the support of Congress in remembering the poor as budgets are solidified. Joshua DuBois, the White House Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, attended a panel discussion. He shared how the President has established a faith-based advisory council of 25 people to actively engage and mobilize people of faith to provide local assistance and advocacy to those in need in their neighborhoods. Bush just said, “I’m Christian, and God is behind me so get out of my way.”

19. DCI74 wrote:

Morbo & Clif, my point remains valid and relevant to me because it’s my reasoning for choosing not to grade him because 100 days bears no significance other than being a nice round number but hey if you feel like you’ve seen enough, do you, My viewpoint has no bearing on you at all so while I appreciate what you both said I don’t need to be convinced why I should follow along with everybody else and grade the president. I am not knocking any of his accomplishments nor am I knocking anyone that’s choosing to grade. I’m just choosing to reserve my grade until I feel more time has gone by.

20. Morbo wrote:

DCI74,

Alright, so you’ll wait for a different arbitrary point in time. Fair enough.

21. Tanya wrote:

Morbo!!! Who are you?!?!?! Love your comments! You’re a smart one! I agree!

DC, just curious, if you HAD to give Obama a grade now (other than incomplete), what would you give him?

22. DCI74 wrote:

Ask me again on 1/20/2010 Tanya. Morbo, one year in office is a lot less arbitrary to me than the first 100 days.

23. Clif Soulo wrote:

Morbo, every job you have had, I’ve had, and probably most of the people posting on here were not elected as the President of the nation. He doesn’t have your average 9 to 5. So not saying that grading his first 100 days isn’t valid, but looking at the bigger picture, it’s very clear to see that it really doesn’t represent much of anything.

Side note:
*I Haven’t seen any MLH exclusive waterboarding demonstration youtube clips yet…have any of you?*

24. Clif Soulo wrote:

Logic, again I say, the 100 day judgment is cute and all, but on the larger scale, what does it represent? Not much. If we do relate this to an everyday job, how many times have you known people who work really hard, but after the probation period and the boss is not watching, they start slacking off, cutting corners?

Not to say Obama will do this, but only to point out that his term is 4 years, and 100 days is a drop in the bucket, as he even said himself.

25. EminemsRevenge wrote:

There’s n Office for Urban Policy???

It ought to come in handy when there’s subway riots in NYC this summer!

A Recession hits US first, and since jobs lag in a recovery, WE are the last ones to benefit—so whilst Obama is hanging out with his let-them-eat-cake buddies i HOPE he’s getting ready to give out the free cheese.

RE: the banking industry—i rate him an F minus

Unlike the Tea Party movement, there’s a growing grassroots movement that believe the Post Office should get into banking: http://www.federaltimes.com/index.php?S=4034396 or at least the credit card business.

President Obama TALKED to the banking industry recently, and NEXT YEAR they won’t be robbing US blind anymore…that’s like giving a crack dealer a year to get out of the business!!!

There’s no way ANYONE should have to pay more than 5 to 18% interest on a credit card, but Obama is more beholden to the Uber-class than the working poor, who increasingly have to use Visa as both their HMO and food stamp program!