We Greet Our Presidents With High Expectations

The late Richard Scammon, the great psephologist, told me a story years ago about presidential mandates. It is probably apocryphal. A young reporter was meeting with the newly elected president John Kennedy. “What is the meaning of your election? What is your mandate,” he asked. The new president reportedly turned in his chair and pointed his finger, “Mandate, Schmandate, I’m sitting here and you’re sitting there.” An unlikely formulation from the elegant Mr. Kennedy, but I thought of it last week when Barack Obama told Republican leaders in firm language during a discussion of why he should get what he wanted in the stimulus bill, “I won.” That sentiment, and a considerable store of public opinion capital, didn’t produce a bipartisan House vote on the package, the president’s first big test.

Two pollsters, Gallup and Rasmussen are tracking the new president’s approval rating on a daily basis. This is a public opinion first. In Eisenhower’s first 100 days, only four approval questions were asked in that time frame. In George W. Bush’s, with more pollsters in the field, the major pollsters asked 37 approval questions, or one every 2.7 days.

What have we learned in week one? The new President had a 68 percent approval rating for this first three days on the job in Gallup’s sounding. That’s identical to Eisenhower’s initial rating and only a few percentage points below Kennedy’s (72 percent) and above Carter’s (66 percent). Obama’s initial approval rating was 10 percentage points higher than the initial rating of George W. Bush (57 percent), Bill Clinton (58 percent), or George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan (51 percent). By week’s end, Obama’s rating was 64 percent, with disapproval at 17. Rasmussen put the president’s job approval at week’s end at a virtually identical 63 percent, but the disapproval ratings is considerably higher (36 percent) than Gallup’s.

We greet our presidents with high expectations. With the exception of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, all recent presidents were more popular after their first hundred days. That’s a tall order for a very popular president.