What a difference a hundred days can make! The United States of America is a very different place today from what it was on January 19, the day before Barack Obama became president a hundred days ago. In Obama’s America, a woman can sue and hope to win her case if she is discriminated against at work: George W. Bush had made it difficult. Millions of parents go to sleep easy at night in Obama’s America because the healthcare that was denied to their children by Bush has been made available in the last hundred days. Obama has kindled hopes in hundreds of thousands of Americans — including former First Lady, Nancy Reagan — that stem cell research that Bush banned and Obama has allowed may eventually bring cure for diseases like Alzheimers.

Those Indians who love Bush might wonder if the previous president, who clearly had a soft spot for India, could have been all that bad. Take the issue of the rights of a woman in America to sue against pay discrimination. Lilly Ledbetter was the only woman supervisor at her factory in Alabama, who slogged at the Goodyear tyre plant for nearly two decades before discovering that men who stood on the same factory floor and did exactly the same work as her were all earning as much as $1,500 per month more than her.

Ledbetter was disgusted. She took early retirement in 1998 and sued Goodyear. A district court in Alabama ruled in favour of Goodyear, but allowed a jury trial to proceed on some aspects of her case. Juries, made up of ordinary men and women, often decide cases based on common sense. So she was awarded back pay and damages only to find that her employer would go on appeal. The appeals court ruled against Ledbetter. Her case then went all the way from Alabama in the deep south to the US Supreme Court in Washington.

By a five-to-four majority, the Supreme Court rejected Ledbetter’s claims, not because they were untenable, but on the ground that women who found out that they were being paid less than men for the same work had only 180 days after receiving their first salary to seek legal redress. Ledbetter had been legally robbed of over $200,000 in back pay, about as much in pension. There was a national movement to change the law, but President Bush came out against it. So did Republican members of the US Congress, egged on by big business. Among those who opposed the change was John McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent in last year’s presidential election.

During his eight-year rule, Bush had appointed enough backward-looking judges to the Supreme Court to secure a narrow majority opinion in favour of Goodyear. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the only woman on the Supreme Court bench, took the rare step of reading a dissent, supported by four other justices, from the bench. “In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg said in words that echoed the feelings of millions of American women who suffer pay discrimination, many of them without ever knowing it.

Nine days after being sworn in as president, Obama changed the law, signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act, his very first piece of legislation in the White House. Now, women in America have six months after receiving any salary cheque that is discriminatory to seek legal remedy. In 1997, President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, supported by Senator Edward Kennedy, created the State Children’s Health Insurance Programme, which provided medical care to uninsured children in families with modest incomes. Under the Bush administration, as America’s healthcare slipped into deeper crisis and the number of the uninsured rose to 47 million, including nearly 10 million children, the US Congress passed legislation, supported by Democrats and Republicans alike, that would have extended medical care to four million more uninsured children and to offspring of illegal aliens. Bush vetoed the legislation.

The House of Representatives voted at least seven times on the subject, but the Bush White House twisted the arms of Republicans in the Congress into making sure that the bill did not get off the ground. Ultimately, the Congress compromised, eliminated from the bill a provision that would have allowed children of illegal immigrants — who incidentally are US citizens by virtue of being born in America — from receiving benefits and passed a final bill. But Bush vetoed that as well, arguing that it would pave the way for “government-run health care for every American”, socialist style. Fifteen days after entering the White House, Obama signed into law a new bill passed by the Democratic majority Congress that ultimately enabled parents of four million children to sleep at night in peace, knowing that if their kids fell ill, there would be some doctor they could go to without having to choose between meal and medicine.

The expansion of the SCHIP will be funded entirely by new taxes on tobacco products, including cigarettes, loose tobacco and chewing tobacco. Obama quit smoking in 2007. One hundred and thirty seven years ago, President Ulysses S. Grant established by law America’s first national park: the Yellowstone National Park, which till today ranks as one of the finest testaments to mankind’s capacity to protect nature and nurture it for the enjoyment of successive generations. The environment was one of the worst casualties of Bush’s eight-year rule. Reminiscent of stories from the gulag, there were instances of scientists being victimized for wanting to record the truth about climate change.

Precisely one month ago, Obama took sweeping steps to undo some of the damage caused by Bush and protect at least two million acres in nine states as wilderness — from California's famed Sierra Nevada mountain ranges and Oregon’s Mount Hood to Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park and the Jefferson National Forest in Virginia. Somebody slipped into the conservation bill a provision to designate the childhood home of President Clinton in Hope, Arkansas, as a national historic site, but that was a small price to pay for the mammoth effort that Obama was undertaking.

It was not easy for the new president and his most ardent supporters on Capitol Hill. Bush may be gone, but not everyone who upholds his policies. Abetted by oil companies that want these federal lands to drill for crude, Republicans fought tooth and nail to block the bills that allowed Obama to protect the wilderness. The Republican senator, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who led the effort to block the 160 legislation package, argued that preventing drilling for energy on federal lands would deepen America’s dependence on foreign oil. This column largely focuses on foreign policy: Obama’s acts of diplomacy that break with Bush’s sordid legacy in the last hundred days have been numerous — from talking ‘to’ Latin American leaders instead of talking ‘at’ them as US presidents are used to doing, and reaching out to the Muslim world to seeking a modus vivendi with Russia, and setting noble, if idealistic, goals on eliminating weapons of mass destruction. But it is not Obama’s foreign policy that is changing America. It is his effort to re-dedicate the US to the values that it once stood for, values that once made America the leader of the free world. Obama wants Americans to be accountable once again — and account for what they stand for as a nation.

It is something that cannot be explained easily. It can only be felt when one lives in the US through the changes that the new occupant of the White House is initiating. When Obama is out in Washington on personal business — such as the rare occasion when he wants to personally drop his two daughters at school — he insists that his car, and the accompanying security detail, should stop at red lights and follow normal traffic rules like everybody else. Obama allows his motorcade to block traffic and zip through streets only when he is out on official business. Such gestures, albeit small, have a cascading effect.

Last weekend, Washington’s police force showed greater tolerance towards protesters against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s spring meetings than at any time during the last eight years. That is the change that Obama embodied during his presidential campaign. If nothing else, that is the change that makes the last hundred days in America worth living through.