President Obama Reaches 100th Day

A look at campaign pledges the president has kept, and deferred.

ByABC News
April 28, 2009, 5:31 PM

April 29, 2009— -- As a candidate, Barack Obama spent two years on the campaign trail promising to bring change and an end to business as usual in Washington.

The 100th day of his administration provides an opportunity to take stock of what he has done to make good on those campaign pledges.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs modestly gave the administration a "B+" for its first 100 days.

"I think there's always room for improvement. But I think, largely, I think the president and the administration are pleased with what has been done in the first 100 days," he said, citing efforts on the economy, like the stimulus package.

Gibbs said the White House is "playing along" with the media's focus on sizing up the administration at this juncture, calling it "an arbitrary day in which presidents are measured."

The president has done "each and every day exactly what he promised he would do each and every day of the campaign. The president isn't focused on any one day," he said.

So, just how many items on his to-do list can President Obama check off?

Politifact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Web site from the St. Petersburg Times, added up all of the campaign promises Obama made over the last two years and came up with more than 500. Their analysis determined that he has already fulfilled 27 and is working on another 61.

Many of the Obama administration's key accomplishments thus far have been done by the stroke of a pen -- executive orders reversing Bush policies, like the closing of Guantanamo Bay; executive orders that made stricter ethics rules for administration staff, including a lobbyist gift ban; and an executive order reversing the Bush ban on embryonic stem cell research.

Obama did not set a 100-day deadline for his key agenda items -- no candidate wants to back themselves into a corner like that.

But because of the economic crisis, and his belief that the best way to get the economy back on track was through government action, Obama had a sense of urgency at the start of his administration and pushed to quickly implement many of his campaign pledges.

Below is a look at where Obama stands on several of the key promises he made while campaigning for president.