President Obama's first 100 days: An impressive start

We're coming up on the 100-day mark for President Obama's administration, so it's altogether fitting and proper, to quote Mr. Lincoln, that we evaluate the chief executive.

First, as background, it never ceases to amaze scholars and public policy pros how much attention the media devotes to this threshold. Perhaps due to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's transformative 100-day period that marked both the start of the New Deal and mixed capitalism in the United States, the media has evaluated every president's performance at this metric, whether in peacetime or in time of war, whether in economic expansion or recession.