Obama's first 100 days take sharp turn from Bush era

WASHINGTON -- In his first 100 days in office, President Obama has not hesitated to chart a different course than his predecessor, George W. Bush.

Bush focused on the Iraq war; Obama has placed more of an emphasis on Afghanistan. Obama wants the government to have a role in reshaping the nation's health care system; Bush preferred to take smaller steps so individuals could buy private health insurance.

Then there's personal style; the cool, African-American lawyer from Chicago, and the back-slapping white rancher from Texas.

"It's Mars and Venus," says Thomas Mann, senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "It's hard to find a more different contrast between the presidents."

Analysts such as David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Clinton administration trade official, suggest the difference boils down to their attitude toward government: Obama believes in a more activist government, while Bush leaned to finding free-market solutions.

"The Obama administration, I think, has truly closed the door on the Reagan era, when less government was always better," Rothkopf says. "The notion of leaving it to the market — that they know better — has had a stake put through its heart."

Some examples of overturned or modified Bush policies:

• Obama expanded federal support for embryonic stem cell research and overseas family planning clinics that counsel women about abortion. Bush believed federal funds should not support abortion, and he was opposed to extracting stem cell lines from human embryos.

• Obama set deadlines for withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq and shutting down the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bush opposed hard and fast deadlines in both cases.

During Obama's recent overseas trip, a student in Istanbul told him that "some say just the face has changed" in the White House, but the "core is the same." He expressed worry about continuing conflict in the Middle East.