Obama at 50 Days
Op-Heads: a virtual chat on the issues that matter
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In the video above, COM’s Tom Fiedler (left) and Republican communications consultant Eric Fehrnstrom (COM’84) discuss Barack Obama’s first 50 days as president. Click here to watch the short version. Click here to watch the full version.
Since the days of Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, the first 100 days of a new president’s term have been a closely scrutinized measure of America’s new leader. That’s less than 7 percent of a presidential term and an admittedly arbitrary deadline for judging a chief executive’s accomplishments. But the current global economic meltdown, the modern-day 24-hour news cycle, and the pace of initiatives emanating from Washington, D.C., invite an even shorter benchmark for assessing the president’s performance and the nation’s new direction. Opinions on President Barack Obama’s governance may vary, but he certainly hasn’t dallied.
It’s now been 50 days since that bright January day when Obama took the oath of office, and he’s already pushed through a $787 billion economic stimulus package, announced plans for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center and for withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq, proposed a $3.6 trillion budget, convened a summit on overhauling America’s health-care system, and pushed for a $75 billion mortgage bailout, plus hundreds of billions more to rescue the banks — to name just a few of his agenda items.
For an assessment of Obama’s first 50 days, BU Today turned to Tom Fiedler (COM’71), former executive editor of the Miami Herald and now dean of Boston University’s College of Communication, and Eric Fehrnstrom (COM’84), formerly the senior spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign and now a communications advisor for Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC in Lexington, Mass.
Got an issue to debate? E-mail today@bu.edu with “Op-Heads” in the subject line.
Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu. Edward Brown can be reached at ebrown@bu.edu.
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