“This administration is almost boring some of the time. “He’s restored normal governance - and it’s amazing how quickly,” Kamarck told me. In addition, some economists worry that Biden’s huge spending bills could increase inflation.Īnd if Democratic majorities in Congress don’t survive the midterm election in 2022, Biden’s agenda will be stopped dead.įor all those cautions, Biden has succeeded in his first step: He has revoked dozens of Trump’s policies through executive orders and ended Trump’s crusade to defund and dismantle large parts of the federal government. A surge of underage migrants on the southern border has caused a crisis that the new administration, for all its vaunted experience, has struggled to surmount. He’s made a hard-nosed choice that passing bills comes first bipartisanship comes second.Īnd Biden has trouble on the horizon. The president has held affable meetings with Republican senators, only to opt for bills that could be passed without them. Those who hoped Biden would produce a renaissance of bipartisanship have been disappointed too.
That narrow focus is one of the reasons for Biden’s success (unlike Trump, whose attention span was notoriously short), but it has produced frustration among progressives who hoped for more help. Other Democratic priorities - immigration reform, gun control, a $15 minimum wage - have received moral support, but not much more. Here’s another way Biden’s restoration of New Deal-style government has been limited: The new president’s energy has focused relentlessly on four priorities - the pandemic, the economy, climate change and race relations. “We’ll know how durable this is when we see the fate of the infrastructure bill.” “These have been emergency measures, justified by the pandemic,” noted Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institution scholar of the presidency. Unlike FDR’s New Deal laws, its programs - notably the family tax credit that promises to cut child poverty in half - won’t last a single generation unless the president persuades Congress to extend them. More important, while Biden’s relief bill is enormous in terms of dollars, most of its emergency provisions are only temporary. But for all Biden’s unexpected boldness, his record doesn’t reach Rooseveltian standards.įDR passed 15 major pieces of legislation in his first 100 days Biden has passed exactly one. Many Presidents have agreed with Perry, downplaying the importance of the first 100 days.If Biden were simply being compared with his immediate predecessor, he’d be declared the winner of the 100-day race. There’s a real learning curve to the White House that takes more than 100 days to catch up with, even for presidents who have prior experience in politics, which President Trump did not. Overall, Perry believes that the first 100 days is not necessarily the most important time period in a president’s career. In his 100-day plan, which he called a “ Contract With the American Voter,” Trump promised, among other things: “a hiring freeze on all federal employees, … direct the Secretary of the Treasury to label China a currency manipulator, … cancel billions in payments to U.N. But let us begin.”Ĭontemporary presidential candidates have frequently laid out “100-day plans” in order to woo the public as FDR did. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. Kennedy outlined some of his plans for his term, telling the crowd: “All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. During his inaugural address in 1961, John F. The idea still lingered even when Presidents sought to downplay it. Since Roosevelt, presidential candidates have solidified a tradition of campaigning with promises about their hypothetical first 100 days in office, and the media and public have followed suit in keeping scrupulous tabs on these first months of a new president’s White House occupancy. That innovation made the 100-days narrative a natural fit. Perry points out that it was not until after FDR’s election that political polling was introduced to measure a President’s performance, so the 1930s saw is the emergence of the attempt to quantify a president’s successes and failures, as well as his public perception. One reason for its lasting impact is the media obsession with covering a President’s first 100 days with extra attention and scrutiny began as soon as FDR introduced the idea. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered.
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