U.S. President Barack Obama may mark his 100th day in office with high public-opinion ratings, but polls show Americans are less enamoured with the policies he has so far introduced during his young administration.

A new Associated Press-Gfk poll found that 64 per cent of Americans approve of Obama's job performance and 48 per cent believe that the country is going in the right direction.

But political commentator Brad O'Leary said that a number of polls about Obama's specific policy initiatives are less favourable.

According to a Washington Post poll, only 12 per cent of respondents had a favourable opinion of Obama's US$787 billion economic stimulus package, O'Leary said.

Other polls have found that 57 per cent of Americans oppose cap and trade regulations and 75 per cent of Americans oppose gun control reform.

According to O'Leary, while Obama has the support of the American public, particularly thanks to the popularity of his wife, Michelle, his policies do not.

"I think the public relations polls have him still having an enormous impact on the American public, very positive," O'Leary said Wednesday on CTV's Canada AM. "But the polls that are talking about the substance of what he's doing are running very negative."

Solon Simmons, of George Mason University, said Obama could not have imagined when he began his campaign that his presidency would face a great economic crisis, which has forced him to make decisions that have "been of tremendous consequence."

Obama has had to move forward with strong, liberal, interventionist policies that are usually unpopular with Americans.

His economic stimulus package, Simmons said, is "a Christmas tree of liberal programs" that will have an impact for perhaps decades to come.

But Obama will have an easier time pushing through these interventionist policies thanks to the defection of Senator Arlen Specter from the Republicans to the Democrats. The move puts the Democrats one seat away from a Senate majority.

Should Democrat Al Franken win the recount underway in Minnesota, that will give the Democrats the needed 60 seats.

"That's going to be critical here," pollster Shawnta Walcott told Canada AM. "Those 60 seats create a filibuster-proof majority for the Democrats. That means they can now move forward and push through all the president's very innovative and creative and activist agenda items, like health care, like a new round of the stimulus package and so forth."

But Obama will still be expected to reach out to Republicans as he moves through the next 100 days and beyond, Walcott said.

"Unity is still a critical factor and he has to present himself as the unifier," she said. "He's got to show that both reds and blues are at the table, create a land of purple, or create a perception of purple at the very beginning."

With files from The Associated Press