Joe Klein on the President's Impressive Performance Thus Far

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Perhaps Obama's most dramatic departure from the recent past is his public presence: cool where George W. Bush seemed hot, fluent where Bush seemed tongue-tied, palliative rather than hortative. Bush would never admit a mistake, but Obama said the words plainly — "I made a mistake" — when his appointment of Tom Daschle as health-care czar tanked, one of the few significant setbacks during his time in office. (One senses that Obama's cool can quickly turn chilly. "He is not very sentimental," says an Obama aide. "If you're no longer useful, he'll cut you loose.") The President's willingness to speak candidly about American failures when he travels at home and overseas — Wall Street's role in launching the financial crisis, for example — has annoyed Bush stalwarts, but it has opened the door for a new, cooperative foreign policy that is as dramatic a break from the past as the domestic initiatives Obama described in his Georgetown speech.

With the exception of Johnson's remarkable run, the few successful 100-day sprints have been a triumph of vision over substance. Roosevelt, Reagan and Obama changed the national mood more than anything else — and moods can change back quickly, especially in our overripe, overwired cable-news dystopia. As impressive a start as Obama has had, these 100 days could come to seem an overambitious and naive presage of disaster if the President's financial policies are inadequate to meet the crisis; his budget proposals are gutted by Congress; and his attempts to leave Iraq, fight in Afghanistan and negotiate with the Iranians turn sour. "Those of us who are older and more scarred have to be skeptical about all that Obama is trying to do," says William Galston, a Clinton White House policy adviser. "If he's right, our traditional notion of the limits of the possible — the idea that Washington can only handle so much at one time — will be blown to smithereens. If he's wrong, he may be cruising for a bruising on a lot of things. Then again, there's a third possibility: that this is the best negotiating strategy attempted by a Democratic President in a long time and he's angling for only a portion of what he has proposed. But I think he wants it all."

The fate of Obama's first year in office, if not his Administration, will probably be determined by the way he handles four distinct challenges — two in foreign policy and two domestically. The domestic challenges are more important, given the financial crisis. One is whether the financial community will buy his "house built on rock" formulation. "I don't think the banking community understands the scale of the damage that they've done to this society," says a senior Obama financial adviser. And another says, "They're in denial. They don't understand how angry people are about a $1 million bonus."

If the bankers and corporate executives don't understand the need to modify their behavior, Obama's financial plan could come crashing down. There is a minirebellion going on right now among executives, from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to Chrysler, who don't want to take government loans because they won't be able to gorge on their usual bonuses. "The plan to buy up toxic assets is going to evolve very slowly, if at all," an investment banker told me. "The banks don't want to take the haircut, and the hedge-fund managers" — who would partner with the government to buy the assets — "are afraid that if they start making big money on this, Congress is going to whack them the way it did on the AIG bonuses. If this plan doesn't work, it's going to take a much longer time to get out of the recession. And if it takes longer to get out of the recession, the President won't have nearly the revenues he needs to fund his domestic priorities."

And that's the second domestic challenge: the realization that Congress will not give Obama everything he wants. Aides say the President's moments of frustration almost always have to do with Congress. "We know that not every wagon makes it across the frontier," says a top Obama adviser. "But we're not willing to decide yet which wagons are going to make it and which aren't." In fact, that decision seems more and more apparent: Congress is unlikely to pass the linchpin of Obama's alternative-energy initiative — a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions to combat global warming and tilt the market toward energy independence but that would also raise energy prices in the midst of a recession.

Watch TIME's video about Obama's first 100 days.

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