President Clinton's first 100 days in office - 7 May 1993

The telephone rings. A lady with surprisingly, this is San Francisco, a crisp English accent, she wishes to, what's the word? Protest no, scold no, she's obviously much too polite to be so coarse. Let us, as the lawyers might put it, say, she wishes to demur, to raise a well-bred objection. She'd heard my talk here on the radio in San Francisco; I didn't know they took it. Last Monday morning, I ended with a small but heartbreaking illustration of how wide and deep the recession has hit California.

I said that the San Francisco city pound had had to announce that it could no longer afford to maintain lost dogs for five days. From now on, three days would be the limit of their whole dog life unless somebody in the meantime came and rescued them. I was wrong the lady said, it was not San Francisco that had been forced to this distressing economy, it was the city of Oakland across the Bay. I am sorry.

There are certain cities in America that lie so close together that they spend much of their civic energy asserting their special identity making it clear to the stranger that the one is not the other. Dallas-Fort Worth in Texas is one rivalry and the most famous of these twin cities are Minneapolis-St Paul, in fact they suffer from the actual nickname the Twin Cities in spite of brave attempts from time to time to shed the title. I can't, off-hand, think of such rivalry in my native land between that is big cities that lie literally cheek by angry jowl and live in mild, but constant fear that their virtues will be attributed to the wrong twin.

Well now, throughout the past two or three weeks, I have exercised almost saintly restraint in saying nothing about something that everybody was writing and talking about from the president on down. I have to breakdown for a reason we shall go into. The 100 days, the what? It has become one of the sillier conventions of the American presidency or rather of the press that writes about the presidency to mark on the calendar the day the man enters the White House and then to flick along and mark the 100th day of the presidency and then wait greedily for that day. When like a vindictive school master you can mark the president's paper so to speak summing up the first 100 days as if it had been long-established that they constitute a dry run of his first term.

This foolish custom has been eagerly observed by the press and now of course by the whole media since, I should say, the elevation to the White House of General Eisenhower 40 years ago. He was rather bewildered by the news that he'd be expected to get out an end of term report so soon in the new job.

How did it start? I don't think we know who coined the phrase, but the first certain facts are that Franklin Roosevelt was no sooner inaugurated on 4 March 1933 in the very pit of the Great Depression with at least one in four Americans out of work than he called an emergency session of Congress.

And under the eyes of a frightened nation and an all too willing Congress, he barrelled through a freight-train load of legislation that has had no equal before or since. An emergency banking act, he had closed all the banks the night before his inauguration. He set up a Civilian Conservation Corps, which took millions of the young unemployed off the streets and set them to building bridges and planting trees. He abandoned the gold standard; he created a national relief system to go into effect at once to relieve the starving and the shiftless in every city and town. A new agricultural policy under presidential powers, a new farm mortgage programme, he seized all the power stations and commissioned more to develop electrical power throughout the thousand mile long Tennessee Valley. He announced that all new securities must be disclosed, he allowed the refinancing from a fresh start of all home-owners mortgages, he put the government's guarantee behind bank deposits, appointed a federal boss of the railroads. Most conspicuously pushed through a national industrial recovery act, which fixed wages and prices for everybody from steel manufacturers to burlesque strippers. He gave the running of business to national trade associations and launched a public works programme with a borrowed $3 billion, which today would be about 30 billions. All this was done between 9 March at the end of the session on 16 June, exactly 100 days.

Somebody – ah, but who – said it was hundred days as memorable as the hundred days, 116 days to be pedantic but who's counting – that began with Napoleon's escape from Elba, continued with his march across Europe and ended with Waterloo. At that time, a French courtier did coin the phrase a "hundred days" to apply not to Napoleon on the rampage, but to the exile of Louis XVIII. We do know the coiners name and must give him credit for he's the one who unwittingly caused all the silly mischief a count, the Count de Chambord said "a hundred days, sire, have elapsed since the fatal moment when your majesty was forced to quit your capital in the midst of tears".

However, history quite rightly found Napoleon's 116 days more dramatic than the king's absence from Paris and comparing the dramatically all-powerful Roosevelt with Napoleon had a better ring to it.

I think I ought to say, by the way, that if Roosevelt had died on the last, the 100th, of that emergency Congress, his name would have lasted forever in the American record for no such assault of radical change had ever been loosed on the American people. Some people have said that through it, Roosevelt saved the capitalist system, other people say that with that first borrowed $3 billion dollars for public works, Roosevelt started the lurch towards deficit financing, which became a landslide during the next 50 years and landed us in the deep pit of an unpayable national debt.

Now, it's obviously unfair to measure every president's early flexing of his political muscle with the Herculean labour of Roosevelt, but it's done with every new president forcing him to do his own review. And this year, his apologia and you can see what a temptation it is for the party that lost the election to make a solemn list of the new man's 100-day performance and contrast it either openly or by snide implication with Roosevelt's necessary almost dictatorial splurge. Can't you now guess how hungry that the Republicans waited for the end of April – since 1937, presidents have taken office on 20 January and not 4 March. The end of April, when the 100 days was up because everybody knows the Democrats reluctantly, the Republicans mockingly that Mr Clinton's first 100 days have not been, shall we say, exactly Herculean.

No need to recite the distressingly long list of campaign promises gone back on, bold programmes discreetly modified, initiatives revised and withdrawn, enough to remind you first of the sound defeat he took from Congress with some of his own party having the gall to join in the massacre of his $16 million economic stimulus programme. He has now dropped the national childhood vaccine programme; his proud offer of college for any student who wants it has been whittled down to college for a handful of students on more meagre loans. His drive to have political campaigns financed with public money, out. He was determined with some righteous indignation to enforce a bill, a Reagan bill incidentally, to suspend welfare for one member of a couple with a dependent child, if that unemployed worker didn't find a job or be trained for one. However now, Mr Clinton says that bill must be indefinitely postponed.

And even the Republicans don't need to turn the knife in all these small wounds by pointing out the political blunder, a blunder of timing of announcing as his first executive act his intention of taking gays and lesbians openly into the services.

Harry Truman worked quietly with the military offstage for two years before he leapt into centre stage and gave the no-nonsense order that integrated blacks into all units of the armed forces; nothing predicted by the generals and admirals happened. All these sins and omissions have been recited joyfully by the Republicans and Mr Clinton's conservative critics in the past fortnight and inside his own party are sunshine loyalists who nod their head and concede that what their party and the country needs and is not getting is leadership.

After Roosevelt's 100 days, when the Congress went home for a breather and the entire press rose up and cheered as if Pompey was back to Rome in triumph, a famous commentator who had judged Roosevelt to be an amiable man with no single qualification for the presidency wrote, "who would have expected the well-bred genteel Roosevelt to be bloody bold and resolute". Well nobody expected Mr Clinton to be that, but the enthusiasm for him has cooled as, it's worth noting, the enthusiasm for the loser Ross Perot is rising. Today, he would get not 19 but 26 million votes.

However, this melancholic conclusion is to be drawn mainly from the politicians and the Washington media. One polling firm took a survey throughout the American suburbs; 42% of the whole November vote came from the suburbs and the people are by no means so glum, they have their fingers crossed they're prepared to give him time. And, in the meantime, are on his and incidentally Mrs Clinton's side and hoping. Maybe they don't know the origin of the hundred days, have barely heard of Franklin Roosevelt and so, as they say in the Midwest, "pay it no heed".

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