100 Days



April 28, 2001

BROOKE GLADSTONE: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Like toddlers mesmerized by a puppy, journalists are captivated by zeroes at the ends of numbers. The millennium had three zeroes a the end of it, so the press coverage was enormous, and when journalists looked at their calendars and noticed that President Bush was approaching a hundred days in office, they couldn't help themselves. You could sense the media knew there was nothing inherently newsworthy about a hundred days, but it has two zeroes! It's a hundred days! [NIGHTLINE THEME MUSIC]

ANNOUNCER: This is Nightline. Reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

TED KOPPEL: What's so special about a president's first one hundred days in office? Truth be told, very little indeed. They are probably no more or less valuable in forecasting the ultimate success of an administration than those chicken or pigeon entrails that were used by soothsayers in Roman times.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And into the pundits and their predictions. At least entrails have some nutritional value.

BOB GARFIELD:Joining me now is a brand new pundit who was unable to escape the hundred day flu. Jake Tamper [sp?] hosts the CNN program Take Five and covers politics for Salon.com. Jake, welcome to On the Media.

JAKE TAMPER: It's great to be here. Thanks Bob.

BOB GARFIELD: The first hundred days are about to elapse, and we will see stories about the success or failures in the first hundred days of the Bush administration. Why?

JAKE TAMPER: Why are we doing this? Why hundred days?

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah.

JAKE TAMPER: Because it's a neat little device that reporters can't -- it's a round number and reporters can assess; it's a little more than three months, and-- but it's just a journalistic device. I don't even know if journalistic is the word. It's a media device to assess and give an excuse to hype and in--give an excuse to have experts on to talk about that, talk about that. It's like the way the greeting card companies invented Father's Day; the media invented Hundred Days.

BOB GARFIELD:Now there was a time, way back when, let's say during the first term of the FDR presidency that the first hundred days were very significant. There was just a torrent of legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president. The first hundred days certainly meant something. Do they still mean anything?

JAKE TAMPER: Not as much as it did back then. Obviously not as much has been passed. You know it's an, it's an early assessment of the president and his political skills really more than anything else. Like I say, it's a media device; it's an excuse for reporters to bloviate and-- now not that I don't plan on doing my share of it in the next few days, but what a real assessment would be would be to use an actual news hook instead of this artificial one hundred days. To say, for instance, the next time that Bush says something that, you know, causes a huge diplomatic furor to like then do an assessment of all the times that he's done that. That would be a little more intellectually honest I think.

BOB GARFIELD: You mean letting the news determine the coverage of the news.

JAKE TAMPER: Instead of letting the coverage determine the news. Right.

BOB GARFIELD:Various presidents react variously to the whole hundred days deal. JFK hated it; he said, quote, "I'm sick of reading how we're planning another hundred days of miracles." Bill Clinton embraced the whole idea of a hundred days and said it would be, quote, "the most productive in history." How about George W. Bush? What does he think?

JAKE TAMPER: If you look at the comments he made on Wednesday-- with the morning shows and various TV interviews, he seemed to think that he-- if you take him at his word, that he was hitting the ball out of the park!

BOB GARFIELD: He didn't use that phrase. He said "pretty darn good."

JAKE TAMPER: Yeah. [LAUGHS] [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]

BOB GARFIELD:You know he's repeatedly said "pretty darn good." He seems aware that this hundred days phenomenon exists because of late he's been on every television show trying to evaluate his own performance. "Pretty darn good," he says.

JAKE TAMPER: Yeah! Quite modestly. I don't know exactly what, what he thinks is pretty darn good. Some of it I guess has been pretty darn good. If you're, you know, in the coal industry it's been pretty darn good. If you're, well God --if you're a political reporter it's been pretty darn good! He gives us a lot to work with! He benefits from two things; one is Clinton whose first hundred days were disastrous, and two, what we can refer to as the soft bigotry of low expectations.

BOB GARFIELD: Just curious Jake -- how many days has your program been on the air?

JAKE TAMPER: Almost two months. Month and a half, two months.

BOB GARFIELD: And-- how are you doing so far?

JAKE TAMPER: Pretty darn good! Pretty darn good.

BOB GARFIELD: Thanks very much for joining us.

JAKE TAMPER: It's great to be here; thank you Bob.