Terry Sullivan is the executive director of the White House Transition Project and an associate professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He recently released a study on the work schedules of the presidents during their first 100 days in office.
Sullivan spoke with NationalJournal.com's Michelle Williams last week about the pitfalls and opportunities of the first 100 days and gave his take on what Barack Obama's first days in office might look like. Edited excerpts follow. Visit the archives page for more Insider Interviews.
NJ: Why are the first 100 days so important?
Sullivan: Well, I think there are two basic reasons. One is because almost every president since [Franklin D. Roosevelt] has sort of focused on it themselves. It's a standard. It's an easy thing to identify and sit down at the end of the 100 days and say what has this guy accomplished and what have they not accomplished. So it's an easy standard to hold every president against, to compare every president to.The second thing, which is probably more important, is that the policymaking community is, I want to say, a professional community. It's a group of people who have been doing policymaking for a very long time, and it's a very specialized community.
And so the first 100 days are important for reputational reasons. Members of the president's congressional party often are required to take chances with their own careers in making public policy decisions that often they feel like are forced on them by an administration. They need to know that the new president essentially -- literally -- knows what he's doing. There are many public policy issues which are essentially 50 one way and 50 another way, and they look for guidance and leadership.
So you get some sense of the professional reputation of the president, and the same is true of the executive branch. It's critical for the presidency that it act and speak with one voice, and the hundreds of thousands of federal employees look to the president's early activities to give them some idea of the lead that they're supposed to follow.
NJ: Do you think Obama is on track to do well for his first 100 days in office?
Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things that we keep track of -- the White House Transition Project does -- is how quickly the president-elect puts in place the kind of operation that is necessary for a successful White House to work. There are 12 positions that we think of as being critical to a functioning White House, and the president-elect has already announced the selection of eight of those 12.
