Lockhart thinks Obama's hard-at-work image has kept the public supportive [GALLO/GETTY]

As Barack Obama marks the first 100 days of his presidency Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds speaks to Joe Lockhart, a White House press secretary during Bill Clinton's administration, about the success, failures and pitfalls of his time in the hot seat.

Al Jazeera: Is all of this so far about planting seeds and launching initiatives? There is debate over whether there is real progress on the economic front. Looking at this realistically is a lot of this about talks, smiles and handshakes and promises without a whole lot of results so far?

Joe Lockhart: The first 100 days of any presidency is a lot of political stagecraft and not so much substance.

We can never know how bad it could have been if they hadn't stepped into the market the way they did.

You can certainly criticise this programme or that programme but there is a growing consensus that they did a very important triage job of trying to stabilise things and keep it from going off the edge.

The second area is we've really had a fundamental reorientation of our foreign policy, and that's more than just stagecraft.

The president has worked in his foreign trips and domestic speeches of the US being able to work willingly and in a multilateral way and that's had a real impact.

You helped to run a White House message and communications machine. This president has been unprecedentedly busy, with a policy or two announced every day. How good has this president been at managing this message?

By and large they've been able to deliver the message in an effective way and you've seen his public support remain strong.

This has not been the best time for the American economy and for the average American worker this has been a bad time and that very often correlates with negative feeling toward the president, whether they deserve it or not.

This president, I think, by creating the atmosphere that he's hard at work every day trying to solve these problems, has managed to keep the public engaged in a way that they're very supportive.

From a message point of view I think they've been very effective.

It's a testament to his skills, it's a testament to his ideas and the people he's surrounded himself with.

This can't last, this positive glow? The president sometimes seems more popular than programmes that he has outlined.

Joe Lockhart says Obama has done well on the international stage

Presidents can be more popular than the programmes. If people think the president has the right motives, if you look at the Clinton administration, there was not widespread love of the president or the programmes but what kept his popularity is people thought he was working for them.

Obama has an even stronger political combination.

They want to give him a chance, they think it's time for new ideas, and they find him to be a compelling figure.

What kind of pitfalls do you see ahead for Obama? He has made a fateful decision in that he has made a major commitment in troops to Afghanistan. There is no guarantee that that strategy is going to work and it could turn sour in Iraq as well.

Two areas – the world is a dangerous place, and despite all the work you do bringing the brightest minds together, you can't control what happens outside our borders.

And there will be inevitable challenges for the president and I think he'd be the first to admit you don't always get every one of them right.

Dealing with setbacks is a true test of the durability of the president's popularity. Here at home it's a more straightforward test.

The president talks about a lot of different components of his agenda, this will all be measured by how the economy does.

Obama will be judged on the health of the US economy [GALLO/GETTY]

If the economy, if this is just a temporary lull before it drops further, the president will take a lot of the blame.

There's a limit too, when you're at the end of the first year, saying 'I inherited this problem'.

So I think very much the president's political fortunes are tied very closely to the fate of the economy.

There are very real tangible things the president can do to improve the economy, there are things the president has no control over.

There are challenges inherent in foreign policy to any president whatever their approach may be.

Obama enjoys an advantage which is he replaced the sense of America as the lecturer with America as the co-operator.

And it's long overdue and he has tapped into a very deep reservoir both of discontent looking backward and of hope looking forward where the very fact that he's saying "we're willing to work with you" buys him a lot.

Now, does this change in atmosphere make the details of the Middle East peace plan easier at the end?  No. Does the atmosphere help the overall process? Absolutely.

These are still very tough decisions to be made around the world, it is a very dangerous place, charm alone doesn't get you where you need to go.

But the Obama approach makes it much easier to see than the previous president.

But inside the White House, things can seem different?

There's real risk in getting caught in the White House bubble.

You can often let a small and non-representative group, the Washington media and pundits, set the agenda for what's important, because that's often disconnected to what's important to average Americans.

Obama will need to work hard to stay in touch with voters to succeed [Reuters]

It's a very controlled environment.

Often times what the bubble does is it distorts your idea of what victory is. Winning a Washington debate doesn't necessarily translate into winning a political debate out in the country.

So they have to take every step they can to make sure they stay in touch.

You see little things the president is doing that I'm not sure will solve the problem but indicate he knows what the risk is, this on a regular basis, reading random letters from the public, trying to talk to people and stay in touch.

It's a real risk, you can spend 24-hours a day trying to answer all the questions and all the critics and never get to what you're trying to get done in your four years.

If you go to past presidents, the regret they'll often express is: "I didn't spend enough time doing the things I wanted to be doing, I spent a lot of time explaining what somebody on TV thought was important."

And I think this president has seemed pretty disciplined in keeping control of what he wants to do and not get caught up in the day to day fighting.

Time will tell whether they can pass that test or not but a real risk is the farther you get away from the campaign trail, where you're out interacting with people everyday and trying to understand what they want, and you're surrounded by a bunch of advisers who think like you and a bunch of reporters who want you to think like them, you can get separated from the public.