This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 28, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

100 is a big round number.

Yep.

But why is that number used to judge the early portion of a president's term?

Gene Heeling, Vice President at the Cato Institute, argues that to use 100 days to see how well a president gets what he wants,

rests somewhat on the notion that the other branches just rolled over.

The 100 days idea was a sort of dictatorial metaphor right from the start.

You know, it comes into the U.S. presidential lexicon in 1933 with FDR in the Great Depression

and journalists, but it's actually from European history.

Journalists likened FDR's legislative onslaught in the first Deal, two Napoleon Bonaparts break out from Elba and subsequent

three-month rampage across Europe ending at Waterloo. So that's where the metaphor comes from and since

1933 most presidents have been judged in their first hundred days on whether they

got a lot of big tumultuous things done. And by that standard, you know, Trump's first hundred days have

been quite a bit less dramatic, which is mostly a good thing.

Yeah, we use this notion of 100 days as far as a president trying to ram through his

programs, especially, typically one big program that sometimes gets done in the first 100 days.

And as you noted, it seems like a, you know, if that's the measure of success, Congress may not be doing its job.

Yeah, I think you have to look at before you just way up and count by, count the number of big things the president's done in his first hundred days, it's

important to evaluate what he actually wants to do.

And, you know, in the modern era, you know,

most presidents don't get major initiatives passed in their first hundred days. The exceptions seem to be in times of

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