At Neck of State, we do believe that the 100 day mark is valuable, particularly with a presidency that begins in an era as perilous as 2009. The mainstream media, however, is missing the the most important dimension of assessment. Obama should not be evaluated on his bipartisanship, his domestic policies, his international appeal, his public addresses, his presidential memos, his grassroots outreach, or even his Portuguese water dog.

Obama needs to be graded on, and held accountable for, his neckties and other neck accessories. This exactly parallels the mission of Neck of State.

Since taking office, Barack Obama has worn twenty-four different neckties in public, photographed appearances. Obama’s top seven neckties reveal a lot about the type of administration he is crafting:

This chart displays the appearance frequency for each of Obama’s seven favorite ties, as counted during his first 100 days in office.

President Obama knows exactly what he wants, and he goes after it with the gusto and drive worthy of our Commander In Chief. In the case of neck wear, this means wearing his favorite ties early and often. All of Obama’s “fav seven” are either red or blue, and this reflects his Rehnquistian commitment to balance and bipartisanship. While the President is dedicated to hearing voices on both sides of the aisle, he displays extreme bias in his choice of neckties. He wore each of his top seven ties within the first two weeks of his term. Ties outside of the top seven, however, haven’t been knotted up more than three times, and several only made it out of the closet once. (See the bottom of this post for a complete listing of Obama’s Presidential ties.)

Public opinion Obama’s job record continues to hover in the thermosphere.  Because the President and his valedictocracy are adept at correlating fashion sense with public opinion, we predict that the top seven neckties will continue to have a forceful showing for the remainder of the term.

Barack Obama’s Seven Favorite Neckties

Neckties that Obama Wore Three or Fewer Times

After decades of intensive training, years of strategy development, months of planning, weeks of negotiation, and ten seconds of penning, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act this week in Denver, CO. The passage represents an important symbolic victory for a President who took office amidst an economic and fashion maelstrom.

Two days after signing the bill, the President fled the country to Canada, possibly to carry his message of economic recovery through economic stimulus and neck wear fashion to our allies in the North.

For the second Thursday in a row, the president wore his American striped blue tie. It’s appropriate that Obama would wear a tie with American stripes on his first visit to a foreign country while in office. As a candidate in 2008, Obama’s foreign policy credentials were frequently criticized, and now he’s making a daring statement to the world about who he represents (i.e. the American People).

The President also wore the same tie this Monday (February 16, 2009) that he wore last Tuesday (February 10, 2009). This is the first time that the President has worn the same tie twice in a seven day period, which some analysts think may point to the early signs of stress setting in after the challenging start to his first term in office.

In his third weekly address to the nation since taking office, President Barack Obama spoke on the need to act post haste on the stimulus package even if the bill isn’t quite right. From the video:

Legislation of such magnitude deserves the scrutiny that it’s received over the last month, and it will receive more in the days to come. But we can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary. The scale and scope of this plan is right. And the time for action is now.

Neck of State analysts are skeptical about the President’s commitment to acting right now. We expect instead that the stimulus bill’s execution will exemplify the ‘Hurry Up, So That We Can Wait’ Principle, which states that the speed at which an organizational or authoritative entity will take action is inversely proportional to the urgency with which said entity makes its requests.

Case in point: after recording the address sometime Friday, Obama took off to Camp David with his family on Saturday. A fortuitous photographer was able to catch the President truly kicking back with no tie at all.

At Neck of State, we do not believe that this is miscalculation by the President. On the contrary, we encourage the President to take any and all vacation time that he deems necessary to support his inconceivably stressful lifestyle. The switch to casual mode is a signal to the nation that we can all just chillax. The President’s urgency is meant only to strike paralyzing fear into the overconfident hearts of his enemies. His neck wear tells us what he cannot say outwardly in any Press Conference: “Everything will work out in the end. If it hasn’t worked out, then it’s not the end”.