After pooh-poohing the 100 Day benchmark as a “trumped-up journalistic convention” and “a Hallmark holiday” the Obama administration is celebrating with cake and ice cream – or its equivalent for a narcissistic politician, a prime-time televised press conference, reports The New York Times:  

But even as they professed their disdain for the pseudomilestone, Mr. Obama’s advisers have quietly embraced it. Through a meticulously planned schedule - a town-hall-style meeting in St. Louis on Wednesday, followed by a prime-time news conference - and sophisticated management of the news media, the White House is harnessing the insatiable public appetite for all things Obama and turning the 100 Days moment to the president’s advantage. …

“It’s like that old borscht belt thing where the comedian is standing in front of the audience saying, ‘Stop applauding!’ and then he’s motioning them to keep clapping,” said Richard Stengel, the editor of Time magazine. “They’re doing that same thing, saying, ‘This isn’t important, but it’s important.’ ”

But President Barack Obama may be more enamored of himself than many world leaders - and American voters - have been thus far. Never mind what the MSM is telling you about how wildly popular Obama is 100 days into his presidency, The Washington Times reports on a Gallup poll that shows Obama is the second-least-popular president in four decades:  

According to Gallup's April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86.

Mr. Obama's current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

Five presidents rated higher than Mr. Obama after 100 days in office. Ronald Reagan topped the charts in April 1981 with 67 percent approval. Following the Gipper, in order of popularity, were: Jimmy Carter with 63 percent in 1977; George W. Bush with 62 percent in 2001; Richard Nixon with 61 percent in 1969; and George H.W. Bush with 58 percent in 1989.

In one of its typically well-researched historical analyses, RealClearPolitics notes that Obama's public approval “stands in the middle of the ten presidents who preceded him, based on an extensive analysis of historic Gallup polling”:

The bar is 65. That's the average 100-day approval rating for the ten presidents between 1953 and 2009. …

Obama may be the most partisan 100-day president of the modern era, but only by a hair's margin. Obama's partisan gap averages 60 percentage points. Bush was the most partisan modern president at 57 points. Clinton closed his first 100 days with a 51-point gap. …

Obama's polarization was not fated. Republicans approval of Obama dropped from 41 to 30 percent between Obama's first and fourth week in office.

Conservative Republicans drove that decline, their support fell from 36 to 22 percent. …

Obama has held the center thus far. Obama is likely to close the 100-day milestone with about six in ten independents behind him. That would place Obama where Nixon stood, ranking perhaps seventh of eleven presidents. …

But the center is not assured. Last week Obama's independent support ebbed below 60. … For Obama to turn historic bills to law, in the months ahead, the center will have to do more than hold. Obama will have to wield a center overwhelmingly behind him.

But even after 100 days in office, there are too many question marks about Obama. Steven Stark, of The Boston Phoenix, believes “the public still seems uncertain how to interpret the historic nature of the election last November”:

One camp claims President Barack Obama's inauguration marked a decisive break with the patterns of American politics over the past four decades or so, giving him a mandate to forge ahead with sweeping changes. Another believes that while voters were ultimately fed up with President George W. Bush, the financial crisis, which broke in the fall, played the decisive factor in his election. More than just a matter of opinion, the resolution of this dispute will go a long way toward defining Obama's success, since it will determine how much change the nation is willing to tolerate.

Obama subscribes to the first version of events, which is to say that he seems to believe he would have won the election decisively in November even if there had been no financial crisis at all. In this scenario, the crisis is thought to be merely the culmination of a series of wrong-headed Republican policies over the last few decades, which Obama should now set about to undo. …

If the opposition is correct and Obama is misinterpreting his mandate, there is not much of a constituency in the country for comprehensive health-care reform, a new energy policy, and most of his other progressive measures - especially until the financial crisis is over. Moreover, under this view, if the downturn lingers or even worsens, Obama runs a great risk of being seen as worsening matters by his failure to understand what got him elected.

Voters are waiting for the other shoe to drop, because Obama insists on simultaneously tackling several intractable problems and is attempting to advance his over-ambitious agenda by trying to please everyone on all sides of every issue - typically by avoided making tough decisions. As the New York Post puts it Obama and his Dem enablers in Congress want to be “strong and soft. Tough and sweet. Uncompromising and compliant”:

During his campaign, Obama pledged to be forward-looking and constructive. Now he's getting tugged along with the angry mob of Democrats on Capitol Hill who want to string up officials from the Bush administration who fought the fight when it was so much harder, rawer and murkier than it is today.

While former President George W. Bush and Republicans can certainly be accused of fighting terrorism with too much unflinching ferocity, there is one thing no one can dispute: The Bush administration never saw another 9/11 on our soil.

For his part, The Kansas City Star’s E. Thomas McClanahan faults Obama for not setting priorities:

We’re mired in the worst recession since the Great Depression, and Obama’s primary job should be fixing the economy. But he has shown no intention of putting off his expansive agenda. He’s forging ahead with his plans. He wants to do everything at once: revamp the health industry, revolutionize the energy economy, reform the schools.

And he continues to peddle the rhetorical non sequitur that economic recovery absolutely depends on enactment of his entire program - a nonsensical conclusion disputed even by the editorial page of The Washington Post.

After taking Obama to task for last week’s “cynical nod to Turkish generals,” Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass notes that Obama “offers himself up to an adoring world - and the enraptured, Hopium-smoking American media that helped elect him - as a leader more flexible than his hopelessly rigid predecessor, George W. Bush” and explains what that means:

Our president has a fine ear for language and nuance. Yet sometimes he shapes his principles to fit the moment, something anyone who watches Chicago politics understood years ago. The Democratic machine candidates he eagerly endorsed for re-election - from Boss Daley II to Cook County Board President Todd Stroger to disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich - are testament to Obama's flexibility.

But he must stop campaigning someday, and start thinking like a chief executive. And he'll need both eyes to see where he's got to go.

More than one pundit is warning Obama that the first 100 days were “the easy part,” and now he’s got to govern.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus warns, “[w]hile the first 100 days served to set the stage and dispense with preliminaries, the harder work is ahead”:

Some of the heavy lifting ahead is the result of a deliberate and eminently sensible strategy to push off tough or controversial choices - kind of like taking an "incomplete" in a college course but knowing that you'll have to write the paper over Christmas break. For instance, the president said he wanted to close Guantanamo; the hard part will be figuring out how to deal with the prisoners remaining there. (Hint of difficulty: France agreed to take one.)

Similarly, the president reaffirmed his promise to end the military's policy of "don't ask, don't tell." But the administration avoided the opening-weeks mess in which the Clinton team found itself by announcing that the reversal, which would require a change in the law, was coming -- but not right now. As Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Fox News Sunday last month, "The president and I feel like we've got a lot on our plates right now and let's push that one down the road a little bit."

At some point, though, the road runs out.

In Newsweek, the WaPo’s sister publication, Howard Fineman posits that “the next 100 days could be the real test”:

Obama began his presidency literally and politically reaching out as far as he could: to Cuba, Russia, Syria and Iran, for example. Here at home, he hunkered down in the Oval Office with congressional Republicans and leaders of corporate America.

He had two purposes. Diplomatically, he wanted to show off his globalist vision and herald a new era of cooperative good will after eight years of President George W. Bush's my-way-or-the-highway style. Domestically, he wanted to demonstrate good will of a different sort in the midst of frightening economic chaos. …

But now, to make good on the promise of days 1-100, Obama will have to deal with - and in some cases infuriate - his and our own best friends. Democratic and liberal allies won't necessarily like everything the president will have to do; neither will some of our country's traditional international allies.

Throughout his political career, Obama has never shown the stomach for challenging party orthodoxy or powerful constituencies, so The Stiletto isn’t holding out much hope that Obama will do anything to piss off labor unions or anyone else on Fineman’s list.

Fred Barnes, FOX News pundit and executive editor of The Weekly Standard, likens Obama’s first 100 days to “the guy who falls off a skyscraper and halfway down declares, ‘So far, so good’”:

Maybe there's a soft landing ahead for Obama or even a takeoff as his policies succeed. But my expectations are low. One reason is the Obama contradiction. Two of his stated goals (economic recovery, energy independence) are undermined by his actual policies. Another reason is history. There's no evidence to suggest Obama's policies of courting enemies and airing the country's supposed misdeeds will lessen threats to national security or strengthen America's role in the world. …

Presidential honeymoons don't last. Trouble catches up with presidents in many forms: unexpected events, screw-ups at the White House, egregious decisions, failures of policy, and worst of all, a bad economy that lingers. Obama is clever and persuasive, but he's not immune to the way the world works.

For this reason, some Repubs are feeling increasingly optimistic, reports The New York Times, even as their chances of being able to mount a filibuster in the Senate are as good as nil with Arlen Specter’s defection and all signs pointing to an Al Franken victory in MN.  

Editorial Note: The New York Times asked several historians to assess Obama’s first 100 days compared to his predecessors in office, and The Washington Post asked a panel that includes academicians, historians and cabinet officials to offer their suggestions on what Obama needs to do in the next 100 days.