As President Barack Obama approaches his 100-day-mark, it is hard to escape the raft of polls that show him with historic job approval ratings and even more, that show a country that likes its president and beginning to feel better about itself. Other presidents and national leaders have been similarly “popular,” but the ones we remember are those who understood that this bond with people in perilous times gives them a special quality - one allowing them to take greater risks and act boldly to bring change.

Nothing brings on a headache quite like health care reform. My head has throbbed lately, as Congress has begun to consider a serious overhaul--a debate that forces me to recall the painful last time we embarked on a similar effort some 16 years ago. At the time, I was conducting polls for Bill Clinton and, on the eve of his address to a joint session of Congress in 1993--the prologue to the White House's big push on the issue--I went into the field to gauge the national mood. I returned filled with a great sense of hope about the prospects for reform.

The imagery of millions of people crammed into the mall, enveloping the Washington monument and stretching to the Lincoln, there to bear witness on January 20 suggests that President Barack Obama has build some kind of special bond with people. When those people faded away the next day, they left behind what in Washington they call, "political capital" and Obama's got it. Republicans may or may not eventually accept his outstretched hand, but they think long and hard before spurning it because Obama comes to town with the highest job and personal approval ratings since Ronald Reagan. While Obama's bond with people will be tested by the tumult around them, it is one of the reasons he can aspire to lead boldly at a time of crisis.

I'm finished with the Reagan Democrats in Macomb County in suburban Detroit after making a career of spotlighting their middle-class anger and frustrations about race and Democratic politicians. Bill Clinton wrote in his autobiography that my "extensive research on the so-called Reagan Democrats and what it would take to bring them home" was the reason he hired me as his pollster for his presidential campaign.

On election night 1992, all of us from Bill Clinton's war room gathered at the front corner of the stage, looking up as the president-elect delivered his victory speech before the thousands in front of the Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas. As everyone knows now, Clinton had run on "the economy, stupid!" and the "forgotten middle class" and delivered the Democrats an unprecedented win. However, when laying out "the meaning of the election", Clinton barely mentioned the economy. "Perhaps most important of all," he said, is the goal of uniting the country "to bring our people together as never before so that our diversity can be a source of strength". He did not use the words "middle class".

Democracy Corps and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner have combined the last four national polls we have conducted over the last four months, and analyzed this database of over 4,000 likely voters. In his memo, "The Contours of the New Electorate," Stan Greenberg discusses the trends behind the large Democratic leads in the Presidential and Congressional races, which make 2008 look like a very big election.