In this series, APP compares Obama to other modern presidents who assumed the office following an administration of the other party. So the comparison group includes FDR, Eisenhower, JFK, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and G.W. Bush. OIA I - Feb. 7 OIA V - Mar. 21 OIA II - Feb. 17 OIA VI - Apr. 5 OIA III - Feb. 25 OIA VII - Apr. 18 OIA IV - Mar. 11 OIA VIII - Apr. 30 Share on Facebook

Obama in Action Part VI: Day 75
An American Presidency Project Exclusive Analysis

April 5, 2009

SANTA BARBARA—President Obama’s 75th day in office arrived Saturday April 4th, in the midst of an eight-day trip to Europe. This trip began on March 31 in London, and concludes April 7 in Turkey. This was Obama’s second foreign trip. Another to Mexico and Trinidad will occur later in April. By the end of his first 100 days, Obama will have set records for the number of trips abroad and the number of days abroad for any president starting with Franklin Roosevelt.

Legislation

Obama’s first major legislative achievement was the passage, in mid-February, of the $789 Billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In mid-March, he signed the $410 Billion Omnibus Appropriations Act. At the end of March, Obama signed the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act adding over 2 million acres of wilderness land nationally.

In late March, Secretary Treasury Timothy Geithner presented a set of principles to guide reform of financial regulation. Almost immediately thereafter, major legislation was under consideration in both houses to create a new “systemic risk” regulator.

On Friday April 3 another legislative landmark for the President was Senate passage of the budget resolution. The resolution passed the House on April 2. This bill lays the groundwork for Obama’s ambitious programmatic agenda.

Signing Statements

Just prior to day 50, President Obama issued a memorandum on signing statements that embraced so-called “constitutional” signing statements which had become hugely controversial under President George W. Bush. Obama stated then that “I will announce in signing statements that I will construe a statutory provision in a manner that avoids a constitutional problem only if that construction is a legitimate one.”

Since then Obama has issued two constitutional signing statements, one concerning the Omnibus Appropriations Act, and a second involving the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act.

At a comparable stage, the record for our comparison group as of day 75 (i.e., April 4) with respect to constitutional signing statements is displayed in the table above.

Public Approval

President Obama has had slightly higher average approval ratings, as measured by the Gallup Poll, than Reagan, Clinton, G.W. Bush or Nixon. But he lags Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Carter at a similar point in his term.

As the table to the left shows, Obama is the first of the comparison group to have his public standing monitored continuously by Gallup since taking office. A smaller percentage of respondents reported “no opinion” about Obama than for any other President in our group.

Unilateral Action

As our graph below shows, Obama continues to lead the comparison group by a large margin. Roosevelt and Eisenhower are together at the low end. All the others are clustered narrowly in the middle with trends that are remarkably similar.

Going Public Strategy

The Obama White House has continued to be innovative in seeking ways to connect directly with segments of the public independent of traditional media. Perhaps most obvious is the YouTube Whitehouse Channel which reports nearly 30,000 subscribers, but with 365,000 views is not close to top YouTube clips but quite strong when compared to other “News and Politics” channels. Obama has over 6 million “supporters” on Facebook, and over 1,450,000 “friends” on MySpace. Also active are barackobama.com (“Tell Congress to Support the President’s Budget”), and moveon.org (running ads supporting Obama’s Budget).

Continuing Inconsistency in White House “Transparency.”

By our count, Obama has given at least 10 media interviews for which transcripts have not been released by the White House or included in the Daily Compilation of Presidential Documents (DCPD).

In addition, the American Presidency Project continues to detect inconsistencies in the record published by the National Archives (NARA) in the DCPD. A February 4 Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Côte d'Ivoire was published in the Federal Register on February 6, but unlike a March 3 Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency With Respect to Zimbabwe, it never appeared in the DCPD.

The DCPD was introduced in January to coincide with the inauguration of Barack Obama and replaced the Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents which ran from mid-1965 through the administration of George W. Bush. As was characteristic of those volumes of the Public Papers of the Presidents series that covered the administrations of Hoover though Ford, the Daily Compilation uses a numbering system to organize presidential documents. Although NARA has maintained sequential consistency since February 7 with the issuance of document #71, documents 27-29, 42-45, and 67-69 remain omitted.

©The American Presidency Project

Citation: John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, "Obama in Action VI: Day 75 " in The American Presidency Project [online]. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database). Available from World Wide Web: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/obama_in_action_vi_040509.php.