Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, "100 Days, 100 Nights"

News outlets all over are marking Barack Obama's 100th day in office. It's an outdated and not useful benchmark (as in, not relevant to any President since FDR), as Joe Klein of Time magazine recently observed - but even if "the idea that a President can be assessed in a mere 100 days is a journalistic conceit," it's an irresistible one.

And the 100-days thing applies to more than gauging a presidency, as Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings advised us two years ago on the title track to their wonderful album 100 Days, 100 Nights. It takes 100 days to know a man's heart, Sharon tells us: a flawed guy can fake-it-til-he-makes-it for a short while, but eventually his true colors show. "You know, a man can play the part of a saint just so long."

I've found this to be empirically true: most notably, it was at right about the 100th day of living with a certain ex-roommate that he bailed town, in a scene right out of Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm album. It is at around that 100th day of knowing someone that you know what kind of person he will be.

So President Obama, getting back to you - I'm glad you've moved forward with your ambitious and, yes, audacious agenda for America, not letting the wingnuts and verbal snipers distract you from the big picture of how to improve America and thus improve the world. Congrats on the progress thus far in this first mile of your long journey as our President.