Now that we are 100 days into the new era of hope and change, NRO asked friends and contributors to evaluate the president’s performance. Joe Biden did promise that Barack Obama would be tested early in his presidency — how has he done so far?

GERARD ALEXANDER

What strikes me most about Obama’s first 100 days is the lack of ideas fueling today’s liberals. So far, Obama’s foreign-policy changes don’t seem driven by new thinking that’s particularly innovative or sophisticated. They seem driven more by the simplistic critique that if U.S. policy is too muscular, other people will dislike us. That’s too crude to guide American conduct in a complex world. And it can lead to policies like imposing a deadline for shutting down Gitmo when the administration doesn’t have a plan for addressing the underlying problem that Gitmo was designed to solve.

Even more important, Democratic domestic policy so far doesn’t seem to be built on serious new ideas, either. The stimulus bill was massive, but crude even by Keynes’s standards. It’s not informed by sophisticated thinking; it’s special-interest pork-barrellism at its crudest. And calls for a new social compact sound more like the New Deal warmed over.

In other words, the party of America’s intellectuals, led by the egghead-in-chief, is governing without a vision. As a result, Obama’s liberalism has challenged conservatives electorally and organizationally, but hasn’t really threatened them on the terrain of ideas.

This creates a big opportunity for conservatives to start rebuilding their majority on grounds where, despite all odds, they often excel.

– Gerard Alexander is a professor of politics at the University of Virginia and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

JAMES C. CAPRETTA

A series of decisions by President Obama during his first 100 days indicates his plan is to govern from the left — at least for now.

He pushed the so-called stimulus bill through Congress on a largely partisan basis. His first budget submission is an unapologetic call for an activist domestic government — across the board. And he is working with Democratic leaders in Congress to pave the way for a health-care bill that can pass without any need to negotiate with congressional Republicans.

Perhaps the president and his political advisers have calculated that this governing game-plan gives them the best opportunity to secure their agenda while still leaving time to “move to the center” before a re-election effort gears up in earnest.

That may be, and it may work. But there are real risks, too.

It’s one thing to rely on just your partisan allies when the votes are easy, like more government funding for an array of programs in a “stimulus” bill. But it’s quite another when a president must ask his party colleagues to take tough stands knowing full well that it could expose them in the next election.

In the first 100 days of his administration, the president has been able to get by without asking for sacrifices from anyone. The targets have been the usual suspects for liberal Democrats: higher income households, insurers, drug companies, and banks.

But that’s not likely to last for long.

The test will come when Democrats are forced, by events and economic reality, to vote on measures that would impose costs on a broader cross-section of the electorate.

In health care, for instance, there are scores of minefields. A new mandate on employers to offer health insurance would reduce employment while the country remains in a deep recession. A requirement that citizens enroll in health insurance that is more expensive than their coverage today would feel like a tax increase to millions of people. Cuts in Medicare’s payment rates for optional private insurance would mean rolling back extra benefits for millions of enrollees.

Yes, the president and his allies have shown they can expand government over the opposition of Republicans. But can they impose discipline on their own too?

– James C. Capretta is fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former associate director at the Office of Management and Budget.

MICHAEL G. FRANC

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” — White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel

Rahm was right. And if you’re going to overreach, you might as well put all your chips on the table.

Last week, conservatives ridiculed Obama when he ordered his cabinet officials to cut a miniscule $100 million out of $3.5 trillion in total spending. As the New York Post noted, this is “the equivalent of a family earning $50,000 a year slashing costs by all of $1.35.” But, as my colleague Brian Riedl pointed out:

President Obama has reportedly been working closely with noted behavioral economists, and their studies have shown that most people are “insensitive to scope,” meaning they are not very good at putting large numbers in their proper context. People will react about the same to a policy proposal whether the cost/benefit is $10 million, $10 billion, or $10 trillion. Consequently, the $100 million cut may seem huge to many voters.

This insensitivity to scope may explain why Obama has fearlessly, and quickly, gone where no politician has gone before, and without incurring the sort of Main Street backlash many of us predicted. The scorecard is daunting: trillions added to the national debt, welfare reform repealed, old entitlements expanded, new ones created, the financial and auto sectors nationalized, Bush’s successful policies to thwart future terrorist attacks reversed, and our missile-defense program hobbled even as North Korea and Iran flaunt their own nuclear-weapons capabilities to the world.

With the notable exception of the Tea Parties, Americans seem insensitive (thus far) to the consequences of a more muscular federal government. But America remains a right-of-center nation. Those instincts will kick in. The backlash will come. We can only hope it’s not too late.

— Michael G. Franc is vice president for government relations at the Heritage Foundation.

ED GILLESPIE

There are three important aspects of the Obama administration’s first 100 days that offer hope to conservatives.

The first is that President Obama has proven to be more radically liberal than most Americans dared imagine, especially when it comes to the federal budget. One moderate recently told me, “I’m not sure he’s the person I thought he was going to be.” I sense that this creeping doubt is growing among the electorate. Indeed, there is now a wide gap between President Obama’s personal approval and approval of his policies.

In a nationwide survey released today by Resurgent Republic, a new organization to help inform the debate over important policies, 61 percent approved of President Obama’s job, but a majority of voters opposes his $3.6 trillion budget with its $1.4 trillion deficit. And they are deeply skeptical about the amount of money he proposes for the government to spend, tax, and borrow for bailouts and other spending programs that produce few private-sector jobs. Independents, who hold the balance of power in this electorate, are closer to Republicans than to Democrats on these fiscal issues.

Second, the patina of “post-partisanship” that was so much the essence of his campaign persona is disappearing. While continuing to talk a good game, it’s not credible to argue that he has truly reached out to Republicans in congress. In contrast to President Bush, who passed major tax relief and the No Child Left Behind Act with bipartisan support in both chambers, President Obama could not manage to garner a single Republican vote for his “stimulus” bill, and is unlikely to do so with other key bills he has proposed. And his constant attacks on his predecessor and the politicization of this White House (the census, the “Rush job,” etc.) may bring short-term gain, but will diminish his presidency in the long term.

Third, congressional Republicans are being smart to not only oppose his initiatives, but to offer positive alternatives. When it comes to stimulus, health care, energy and other issues, congressional leaders and innovative rank-and-file members are putting forward ideas that show Americans how our market-oriented approach can better solve their problems.

– Ed Gillespie was chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2003-2004. He is a founder of Resurgent Republic.

MICHAEL KNOX BERAN

A hundred days into the new administration, President Obama’s morbid reliance on the teleprompter has become a metaphor for a leader who too often seems to be on intellectual autopilot.

The president campaigned on a theme of change and pledged himself (to quote from The Audacity of Hope) to a “project of national renewal” that would restore “our communal values.” Our communities do need reviving, but none of policies the president has so far put forward show evidence of the innovative, post-partisan thinking he promised.

Politics, it is true, is the art of the platitude. But in signing the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act (no kidding, that’s what it’s called) last week, a bill that triples the size of AmeriCorps, President Obama carried his devotion to the commonplace a little far even by presidential standards. AmeriCorps — I wonder which scribe came up with that Orwellian formulation? — is a Clinton-era program designed to promote community by means of federal bureaucracy. The idea that what American communities need is more federal babysitting — babysitting by the same people who brought you the recent Air Force One fly-by in New York — does not precisely arrest with its novelty.

If the president were seriously interested in original thinking about community regeneration, he would take on those on the Left whose cultural iconoclasm continues to undermine the country’s neighborhoods. He would express support for “New Urbanists” like Léon Krier, who seek to revive, at the local level, the cultural tradition of the town square and village green. He would take on the mandarins of the teachers unions, whose progressive policies make it difficult for teachers to hand down to the next generation of Americans the cultural capital that makes a town square possible.

Progressive iconoclasts reject the older culture precisely because it is for them a rival power, an obstacle to their plans to mold a national community under the aegis of the state. A hundred days in, President Obama, though he campaigned on a platform of change, appears committed to the stalest of the old progressive orthodoxies.

– Michael Knox Beran is a contributing editor of City Journal. His most recent book is Forge of Empires 1861-1871: Three Revolutionary Statesmen and the World They Made.

CHARLES MURRAY

One of Lyndon Johnson’s press secretaries, George Christian, once said that no one should be allowed to work in the West Wing who has not suffered a major disappointment in life — the atmosphere is too intoxicating and the power too great for callow young things who do not know from personal experience how badly things can go wrong.

Unlike George Christian, we don’t have to worry about just a few special assistants. We have a president who, from the time he entered Honolulu’s Punahou School as a teenager, has lived a magical life. Everything has gone right for decades now. Nor are any of his aides crouching beside him in the chariot whispering, “You too are mortal.” On the contrary, if we are to judge by Larry Summers, even his most astute advisers suppress what they know to be true to accommodate Mr. Obama’s wishes.

Down the road, the president’s economic policy will engender a new crisis that, to be met, will require him to reassess his assumptions and to defy his political base — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do either of those things. Down the road, a hostile world will require him to make a foreign-policy decision with no good option, only a choice among bad options, in the face of horrific consequences if he is wrong — and we haven’t a shard of evidence that he is able to do that. Worst of all, he will come to those pivotal moments serenely confident that whatever he decides will work out.

How do I think about the Obama presidency as I look ahead? I’m scared stiff.

– Charles Murray is W. H. Brady scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

JAY NORDLINGER As he campaigned in the Democratic primaries, some of us said, “He has the mentality of a Marxist grad student.” He was clearly an “associate” of Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi, Bill Ayers, and other lovelies. Then came the general election: and he sounded far more responsible. In the presidential debates, he passed for a moderate or even a conservative Democrat. At times, he could even have been a moderate Republican, à la Lugar (whom he cited, favorably). Then he was sworn in. So?

He moved very quickly to throw off the slightest restraints on abortion, and to make embryonic-stem-cell research a free-for-all. He evinced not the slightest moral qualm.

We were in the throes of a financial crisis, as we still are: and Obama and the Democrats used this to impose the spending of their wildest dreams. Very little in the “stimulus” package is of an economic-stimulus quality: This is just that dream Democratic spending. And a vast increase in government power goes hand in hand. The presidential chief of staff said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Now is the time to reverse Reaganism. It may be a long, long time before we re-reverse.

It is in the realm of his foreign-policy gestures that Obama has seemed most like that Marxist grad student: His interview with al-Arabiya (in which he reassured dictators and put paid to the hated Bush’s “freedom agenda”). His New Year’s greeting to “the people and leaders of Iran.” His further message to the mullahs: Hey, just keep on enriching. We’ll deal with you anyway. His deep bow to the Saudi king. His soul-brother shakes and grins with Chávez. His flippancy about the Bay of Pigs. His “apology tour,” or tours. His constant, unseemly, unmanly denigration of Bush. Has he ever stopped campaigning?

His wife said that she had never been proud of America until he got politically popular. The president seems to share this mindset. To me, we have had a long hundred days. Only 2,820 days to go.

– Jay Nordlinger is senior editor of National Review.