President Obama's speech in Cairo Thursday was not just carried live by American television networks, but broadcast around the world in more than 30 different languages. A significant speech, yes, but just the latest in a series of "major speeches" Obama has given in the first five months of his presidency. And it came one day after the conclusion of a major network prime-time series looking behind the scenes of the Obama White House.

While administrations typically see a drop-off in attention after the artificial 100-day milestone, the 44th president continues to dominate the media landscape. Could the White House be testing the limits of overexposure, or is it simply making the most of a new president's persistent popularity?

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"I thought they were right on the edge or over the edge," David Gergen, who worked in the White House under several presidents, said recently.

Using the president as salesman-in-chief continues to be at the heart of the administration's communication strategy. With an unprecedented honeymoon in his first few months, the White House has maximized the president's availability, taking advantage of the heightened interest to garner wall-to-wall coverage not just for its daily message events, but in its to target specific interest groups and demographics. That means three prime time news conferences, appearances on ESPN choosing NCAA brackets, and dropping by "The Tonight Show" to joke about his bowling skills, to name just a few.

In part, the all-Obama-all-the-time strategy was necessary because he, despite extensive coverage in the 2008 campaign, has "been on the national stage for such a short period of time," said Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University professor who studies the White House message operation. "He's showing his brand of leadership. He's showing who he is," she said.

Kumar explains that any communications operation is going to reflect the president it serves. And the manner in which this president has chosen to communicate his agenda reflects his more deliberate, thoughtful approach. The extended prime time press conferences, major speeches and sit-down question and answer sessions with reporters give him a more expansive forum to explain his thinking.

Obama held 12 Q&A sessions in his first 100 days - six solo and six with foreign leaders. President Bush, by comparison, had only five in that period. Kumar also notes how many extended interviews he has participated in, particularly with regional or special-interest media.

Obama has avoided, however, the kind of short, spontaneous media availabilities that his predecessors used more often. Obama had just 18, compared with 53 by President Bush and 82 by President Clinton.

"You can see their elements of control," Kumar said. "They want expansive forums, something where he can talk at some length."

Observers see in this White House an extension of a successful strategy employed in the campaign. Indeed, most of the communications and press staff has the "campaign DNA" as Kevin Sullivan, former White House communications director under President Bush, calls it. But there are examples that show how it does not translate well into governing, he adds.

"There have been a couple times where they talked about policies before they were fully baked," he said. Last week, the administration announced the creation of a new "cyber czar" to oversee the nation's Internet infrastructure. But oddly, the president's announcement did not include the selection of an individual to hold the post, muffling it altogether.

"On the campaign trail you can be aspirational and throw different things out each day," Sullivan said. "When you're in the White House, you have to have specific answers. You have to have details. You have to have it all buttoned down before you go out talking about."

Gergen agrees that some of the mistakes in messaging have reflected "uncertainty in policy making." And at times, they have gone overboard in targeting rivals. "They've gratuitously whacked the business community a couple times in ways that struck me as excessive and unfair," he said. "It hasn't made much of an impact on the public at large, but it has sent a signal out to the business community that hasn't been helpful."

In advancing their major policy goals, though, Gergen said that what has struck him most has been a strategy to leave most of the legislative maneuvering to the Congress, keeping what could have been heated debates simmering off to the side.

"By this time in the Clinton years, when we were this far into the shaping of a health care bill, there was huge controversy," he said. "People are moving ahead on the Hill, and because it's not coming out of the White House and the White House is not beating the drum the way you normally do for a great issue, it's not on center stage."

The greatest challenge to the White House thus far has been managing the diverse array of issues coming all at once.

"The arc of prioritizing is something that you always have to manage," Sullivan said. "In this particular case, when you're looking at the recession, Iraq and Afghanistan, and the sub issues to these economic issues - autos, credit - they're all big, and you have to do all of them. So what you end up doing is you convince people - and we said this a lot in the White House -- we can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Despite the hiccups, observers across the spectrum say it's hard to argue with a strategy that has left the president as popular, if not slightly more popular, than he was when he took office.

"Here's a man who continues to hold 90 percent support form self identified Democrats, and 60 percent or more among the public generally, whose leadership has been strengthened by his communications team," Gergen said. "He's had one of the strongest arcs of any president in recent times."

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