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.

NJ: Which are the 12?

Sullivan: Chief of staff, transition director, national security adviser, director of OMB, director of personnel, director of White House management and administration, congressional relations, White House counsel, press secretary, staff secretary, communications director and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

And right now, of the 12, Obama has set a record for earliest appointment on six of those 12. And there are still four remaining that he hasn't appointed he could still set a record on. I mean, he's going to announce the OMB director today [Nov. 25], and that would be a seventh record-setting appointment. And he's bested the average presidential transition on each one of the eight. So he's either bested the average or bested the fastest appointment on all eight of the 12 positions that he's already appointed.

So that's pretty good. And I think that has a little to do with knowing what those jobs were and knowing how important it is to get the White House appointed, because that's really the core of the presidential decision-making apparatus.

NJ: What might we expect from Obama during his first days in office?

Sullivan: Well, I think obviously there's going to be a huge push for an economic stimulus package. The economy has really taken away from him the opportunity to pursue the sort of campaign promises that he made. So first and foremost will be the economy; first and foremost will be the setting out of the federal budget. You know, I think we can expect those to go quickly.

We can expect the nominations to get approval quickly. Typically when we have presidents and majorities in the Senate of the same party, what happens is that we get lightning advise-and-consent, and I would expect that. So the president-elect will really have a good opportunity to focus on an agenda that he wants to focus on, or that he needs to focus on, and he'll have a team in place to will allow him to focus on them. So I would think there would be quick consideration of the things he thinks will make a difference.

NJ: What is the biggest challenge that you think Obama will face at the beginning of his presidential term?

Sullivan: Well, there are two kinds of big challenges. One is policy, one is process. And we often underestimate the capacity of process to undermine policy accomplishment.

The biggest challenge on the policy side is probably going to be the economy and the economic instability, because a lot of the economic instability -- especially at the macro level, at the consumer level -- is a question of confidence, and that's one of the places that a president can play a role in shaping expectations about what's going to come.

On the process side, you know, you can't move the ball forward if you don't have a team working together. So that's a very big challenge. That's a big challenge for every president. You know, you look at George W. Bush's first year in office: There was not a single leak, not a single story written in the Washington Post or the New York Times, not a single one quoting unattributed, unnamed White House sources. And that's an incredible testament to everybody pulling on the same oar at the same time that you have to have to move your agenda forward in this very complex policy environment in Washington. So that's just how important the process side of it is.

NJ: At the end of the 100 days, the media will assess how well the new president is doing. Obama will inherit one of the more difficult circumstances in modern presidential history. Are there things that Obama can do to give him some leeway with these bigger problems?

Sullivan: Not really. I think the thing that he's got to do is he's got to be realistic. I think it was a good thing that he was saying yesterday [Nov. 24] when he was talking about the economy -- that it's not going to be an easy thing to fix. And that's not some kind of cynical way of lowering expectations; it's a reality, and Americans need to be prepared for it. And in a sense it's the kind of straight talk that Americans actually appreciate from their leaders.

So I think there's going to be some things he has an opportunity to accomplish a great deal; he has an opportunity to fail on an extraordinary stage. You know, that's why these guys do this. You can't be a chapter in a history book unless you face these extraordinary opportunities and do your best to accomplish [them] and then you let the chips fall where they may.

NJ: Are there any good examples of presidents who have done fairly well during their first 100 days?

Sullivan: Yes, George W. Bush. I think inside his first 100 days, he got all of the major policy recommendations -- he got all of them considered -- and that's pretty unusual. The first 100 days is not a very long time.

A lot of people think Lyndon Johnson's first 100 days in office were remarkable, and they were remarkable, but they were not remarkable in terms of policy production. You know, there was a crisis -- a continuity-of-government crisis -- and Lyndon Johnson worked very hard in those first 100 days to make that transition a significant and secure transition, and those were phenomenally important accomplishments in the Cold War. But they also tend to attribute to his administration the passage of a bunch of legislation that actually didn't pass until later -- like the war on poverty and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Those are the things that did not happen in the first 100 days.

But those two -- George W. Bush on the one hand, who really led a very successful transition, especially given the constitutional uncertainty of his ascension to power, and Lyndon Johnson.

NJ: What are some bad examples?

Sullivan: Oh, well, I think the widely accepted all-time record-setting bad transition was Bill Clinton's -- and for just about everything you can think of, starting with the White House staff. Whereas we're pretty convinced that it's critical to get the White House decision-making apparatus up and running, Clinton did exactly the opposite. He spent all of his time focused on policymaking and an emphasis on the Cabinet -- and those are policymaking, but they're not presidential policymaking actors. And so then he started the first 100 days literally on the defensive, making the wrong decisions and allowing every opportunity that he had in the first 100 days to be dissipated by sort of unpreparedness.

NJ: Is there anything else that you'd like to add about the first 100 days?

Sullivan: We've just now released a study on what it's like on the inside of the 100 days, and the picture of what it's like on the inside of the 100 days is not at all what the public thinks or what memoirs portray.

NJ: How so?

Sullivan: Well, there are a couple of classic examples. One is this image that there's a lot of communicating. In the first 100 days, the average president spends between 3 and 5 percent of his time engaged in all aspects of communication. So you know, this image of the president as being the great communicator is a very, very small percentage of the president's time. It's about as much time as you spend eating in your average day. So that's one thing.

Another thing is, if you look at the 100 days, the number of people who are in regular contact with the president is extraordinarily small. A president, on average, will see about 90 to 150 people a day in events and meetings and that sort of thing, but he sees almost nobody on a regular basis. So the number of people who see the president on average in the 100 days, at least once a day during the 100 days, is five people, outside of the president's family. There really aren't that many people who see what the president sees. So really, it's genuinely the case that nobody sees what the president sees, nobody knows what the president knows, including the White House chief of staff and all these other people that we often think must surely know what's going on.

So those are things that we can learn from the study of 100 days that really reshape the way we think about what the president's job is, what presidents do and how presidents affect public policy.