It has become more than a cliche: Every new president's first 100 days are a crystal ball foretelling the course of his administration.
But today, as we mark Day 101 of the Obama era, the danger in our sound-bite and Twitter-laden information society is that we'll start judging the president in artificial slices of roughly three months each, the way corporate executives live and die by their quarterly reports.
I can see us calculating the Dow Jones industrial average's performance for each 100-day interval. (The Dow fell 1.2% in President Obama's first Hundred Days, but the Nasdaq soared 12%. Hey, I'm as much a creature of the zeitgeist as the next guy.)
We'll tally bills vetoed, flu shots delivered and promises made, kept or broken.
At work Wednesday I was greeted with a news release proposing what Obama should do to fix the commercial real estate market in "the second hundred days," and was gripped by a vision of the abyss.
But events in the real world don't unfold in discrete packets any more than do the fates of major corporations. Nor do the frenetic first three months of any presidency tell us much about the months to follow.
The best illustration of that is the Hundred Days associated with Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term, the first Hundred Days to be given the name.
History doesn't tell us who first dubbed this period the Hundred Days. As it happens, the reference didn't mark the days since FDR's inauguration, but the length of the special session of Congress he convened March 9, 1933, to enact emergency legislation -- a session that ended after 100 days on June 16, the 105th day of FDR's presidency.
Roosevelt himself first used the phrase in its totemic sense about five weeks after the event, during his third fireside chat, on July 24, when he evoked for his audience the "hundred days . . . devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal."
As was his habit, FDR was overselling the New Deal by presenting it as a full-blown and fully consistent economic program. In truth, as Raymond Moley of FDR's "Brain Trust" wrote later, the Hundred Days were as haphazard an agglomeration of found objects as "the stuffed snakes, baseball pictures, school flags, old tennis shoes, carpenter's tools, geometry books and chemistry sets in a boy's bedroom."
