What do you think of Obama’s first 100 days so far?

Whenever I teach “The American Presidency,” I talk about how there are two kinds of time. There’s cyclical time in presidencies, when one ideology dominates for a while, then it gets exhausted and a different idea on how to govern [comes in]. That’s part of the history of the American presidency.Everyone was talking about how this might be a change for the Republicans and the Democrats. The difficulty is that as the United States has grown and the government has grown in size, in complexity, in force, that’s the linear time, or the secular time, as one political scientist calls it. It becomes more and more difficult for a president who has these new commitments, a new way of doing things, to get his way. The amount of time that a president has when he comes into office becomes more narrow, becomes less.

I think we’re seeing that with Obama right now. He’s got the first 100 days. Most economists say that the stimulus package that is out there — that he has sought bipartisan support for — isn’t large enough, and indeed, he made all these sacrifices in terms of size and the focus from spending to tax cuts in order to try to get bipartisan cooperation, which just is not there because it’s not in the political interest of the Republican party to cooperate. So it’s going to be very interesting to see what happens. Some people are suggesting that he has to become much more partisan, through the feet to the fire and fight a filibuster on the part of the Senate Republicans, dare them to try and stop this thing. Forthcoming business is just going to be harder and harder even if they manage to get this first package through, so I think that’s part of what’s going on in the first 100 days.

Now, internationally, Vice President [Joe] Biden this weekend at the European Conference was a big hit. The Americans sat and listened while the Iranians spoke. There’s progress that way, [but] the president is in charge of this enormous, vast machinery and changing it is always harder than it looks on the outside. If he wants to accomplish what he should accomplish, confrontation with the Republicans is the order of the day. It looks like he’s heading that way a little bit, but it’s not clear how far he’s moving.

Do you think that the expectations for Obama were too high going in or higher than other presidents?

It’s always funny because every president who’s just elected, who’s just taken office, is always perceived to be a genius. We’ve always thought that way about them. This was a little different because of the historical nature of an African-American being elected for the first time, one, and two, because the nation is in extremely dire straits right now. Republicans have criticized the president for talking about just how bad things are, [they] say it’s fear mongering. But things are pretty dark there and they’re likely to get worse. So I think that what was happening, especially after the election, was that everyone was pinning their hopes on this. He’s got that going for him. Even though he’s slipped a little bit in the polls, he’s still at 65 percent in terms of public approval, and he’s got to rebuild that and that’s what he’s doing right now. Monday, he has a press conference, [and] he’s on the road. And the places he’s going are key. One of the states he’s going to is Indiana, and there’s a key senator there who hasn’t yet thrown his support behind the stimulus package, so he’s going to his state. Also going to Florida, and pointing out that spending this in terms of the Miami Airport will contribute 25,000 jobs to the economy of Miami, and just like that. This goes through.

There’s been some news about Obama and health care. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

He managed to sign right away the expansion of the child health insurance program, SCHIP it’s called. That was something that was bipartisan that was passed last year and was vetoed by President Bush. So to get that out, that was a good thing initially, but the question of the expansion of health care is one of the things the Republicans are deeply suspicious of, and from their perspective, rightly so. This huge stimulus program can also be a significant change in policy.

Didn’t the Republicans have a lot of the funding for education cut?

Yeah, some of it was for bricks and mortar for schools, and they cut 40 billion in direct aid for the states, which means that the states will have to start cutting jobs. It’s kind of hard to figure out what it is the Republicans want, other than to make mischief. In other words, Rush Limbaugh, who seems to be in control of the Republicans, hopes the President fails. I’m certainly very suspicious of President Obama, especially in terms of his backing away from the national security, backing away in terms of Iraq. He’s more than capable of being everything of a politician that any other president has been.

What do you think about the War in Iraq? Do you think it will end?

No, I don’t think so. I believe that two years from now, we’ll probably still have 50, 60 thousand soldiers there. We got ourselves into a real quagmire, and I’m afraid of expanding that quagmire into Afghanistan. Maybe the Iraqi people will get their act together more than they have.

What do you think of his proposed closure of Guantanamo Bay?

Issuing an executive order doesn’t do it. His nominee for the CIA, Leon Panetta, has not given a guarantee that he would never use torture, but we’ll see. Certainly, the aspirations of any new president always run into political realities, but he’s been given more of a mandate than any president for a long time, since Reagan, and he’s got to learn how to use it.

What grade would you give him so far?

Well, here are a couple of things. One, he’s hit the ground running, despite all the flak about some of his appointments, much quicker and much better than any president in recent memory. [Most presidents] try to find their office in the White House [first]. They haven’t got their public relations game going very well. The fact that he has many of his cabinet officers chosen, actually, about all at this point, and many of them are already in office, is remarkable. So that part’s been good. The idea that you can have an $800 billion stimulus bill voted on before Friday of this week is great, if it goes through. So in that sense I give him at least a B+. On the other hand, I don’t know if it’ll be good enough to get us out of the mess.