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Obama: 100 days......and counting!

"Nobody feels like hanging out tinsel to mark Barack Obama's first 100 days – least of all the President himself. After the cheering crowds in Grant Park and the choked-up crowds on Inauguration Day went home, he has been left with a depression, a slew of wars, and an unravelling climate. Mario Cuomo, the former mayor of New York, said politicians "campaign in poetry, but govern in prose" – and Obama has had to hit the prose hard. So now George W Bush has been dispatched to torture only the English language, has change come to America?"

So begins a piece "To be the new FDR he must stick to his ideal" by Johann Hari in The Independent.

Hari undertakes an analysis of the pluses and minuses of Obama's 100 days in office. It's not all the hype might suggest.

As Hari says:

"Yet somehow, no-drama-Obama remains impressively Zen and sweatless in the middle of this whirlwind. Should we have "faith" he will do the right thing? Absolutely not. You should pick the best leader available, and then pressure him or her like hell. Obama is dramatically better than Bush – but he will ultimately only be as good as the pressure put on him by ordinary people. FDR came to power as a budget-balancing centrist, until the American people forced him to the left, and to greatness. One hundred days in, are they ready to press Obama to act on his own best instincts? He ain't Franklin Delano Obama yet."

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