By PETER BAKER / WASHINGTON


It has been just one year since Barack Obama’s election, a year since that moment when his supporters felt everything was possible amid the lofty talk of “remaking this nation” and the determined chants of yes, we can.

The hope and hubris have given way to the daily grind of governance, the jammed meeting schedule waiting in the morning, the thick briefing books waiting at night, the thousand little compromises and frustrations that come in between. The education of a president is a complicated process. And as Mr. Obama has spent the last 12 months learning more about wielding power, his country has spent it learning more about him.

He has proved to be an activist president, one with an appetite for transformative ideas even as he avoids defining them, or himself, too sharply. He is a study in contradictions, bold yet cautious, radical yet pragmatic, all depending on whose prism you use.

He has discovered that the power of oratory that proved so potent on the campaign trail has its limits in a world where words mean only so much. His faith in his ability to bring people together has foundered in a polarized capital, as has his interest in trying.

After tackling the deepest recession in generations, Mr. Obama now presides over an economy finally growing again but still losing jobs and piling on debt. Now confronting what may be the two most defining issues of his presidency in health care and Afghanistan, he is coming to grips with their complexity in ways he clearly never did during the campaign. And beyond those issues loom Iran, climate change, immigration and financial regulations, among others.

“The central question that emerges after these months is can he make it all work?” said Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman who in recent years helped lead the commission that investigated the attacks of September 11, 2001. “I think he’s learned that governing is harder than campaigning and I think he’s learned it with a vengeance.”

In the White House, the wistfulness for the simpler days is palpable.

“The day was just suffused with emotion and hope and warmth,” David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, recalled about Election Day last year. “But it is an emotional peak that you can’t maintain day to day as you do the business of government. The challenge is to maintain that degree of idealism and optimism as you work through the meat grinder.

“Everything about the politics of Washington,” he went on, “works against hope and optimism and unity. So you have to push against that every day, understanding that it’s going to be an imperfect end result.” He added: “That night was sublime. And much of what goes on in Washington is prosaic. Or profane.”

In the process, the romanticized image of Mr. Obama, captured in the HBO movie “By the People” that premiered on November 3, has given way to a more conventional picture, a politician who inspires and disappoints, energizes and aggravates.

At times, he has promoted a transparency that has gone beyond his predecessors; at others, it looks to many like politics as usual.

“He continues to be a very smart, energetic, charismatic figure that the American people like. Clearly I don’t think he inhabits the lofty pedestal he occupied before the election,” said Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, a leading Republican lawmaker. “People are looking at this and thinking if we voted for change, this isn’t the change we wanted, or this is too much change.”


The Intelligence column will return next week.