Matt Wuerker 'Change has come' ... or has it?

In the year since he was elected president, Barack Obama has revealed himself as one of the boldest leaders to occupy the Oval Office in the modern era.

In that same year, Obama also has revealed himself to be an innately self-protective, constantly calibrating and, in some surprising ways, supremely conventional politician.


So who is Barack Obama? The drama of this presidency — in sharp relief with Wednesday’s one-year anniversary of his 2008 triumph — revolves around how Obama navigates his own contradictions.

Obama turns out not to be a Bill Clinton-style centrist or a Paul Wellstone-style liberal. His plans for health care and his trillion-plus dollars in new spending have earned the ire of Rush Limbaugh for being too grandiose and of Arianna Huffington for not being grandiose enough.

Obama is the president as grand improvisationalist: a leader of epic ambitions who — when faced with a difficult choice — almost always pursues his aims with a pedestrian strategy and style.

This may be a shrewd approach to governing. But it manages almost by definition to defy and disappoint the huge — and wildly divergent — expectations Obama encouraged supporters to harbor for his presidency.

As the election anniversary approached, Obama several times in public remarks acknowledged the sense of letdown and pleaded for patience.

“‘Well, why haven’t you solved world hunger yet?’” Obama said in New Orleans the other day, mimicking the cries of critics. “‘Why — it’s been nine months. Why?’ You know? I never said it was going to be easy. What did I say during the campaign? I said change is hard. And big change is harder. And after the last nine months, you know I wasn’t kidding.”

Obama may not have promised change would be easy. But he did convey what now looks like a too-glib impression that he could unite opposites and reconcile contradictions by the power of personality — hard to do when his own personality has competing strands.

Obama has the soul of an ideologue. He wants to be a transformational president — unconfined by the limitations of conventional politics and determined to put a lasting mark on his era.

In his first year, he has presided over more new domestic spending than Bill Clinton, the last Democratic president, did in eight years. The “big bang” agenda he laid out earlier this year on health care, energy and financial regulation unmistakably signaled his ambition to vastly expand the role of government in American life.

But Obama also has the soul of an operative. He and his West Wing team — dominated at the top by people whose expertise is in the world of campaigns and Washington maneuvers — have proved to be far more familiar political types than they admit to themselves or than was forecast by his insurgent campaign and the expansive, at times almost messianic, rhetoric that powered it.

“What surprises me most is the loss of Barack Obama as movement leader,” Malika Saada Saar, a human rights organizer, said on POLITICO’s Arena forum.

As Obama’s campaign reached its climax, in Saar’s memory, it conjured up echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Now that he has entered office, she finds that spirit missing: “During this time of economic decline, two raging wars and an uncertain future for so many Americans, we need a movement-leader president who can call forward our courage and relentlessly move us toward making the difficult policy changes that we need.”

When it comes to policy, Obama is more willing than any Democratic president since Lyndon B. Johnson to propose expansive goals — but is insistent always on preserving flexibility in the name of realism or political self-protection.

On health care, it is clear that Obama’s team is more concerned with a victory — one his team expects by the end of the year — than with the programmatic details. On national security, he so far has offered far more continuity with George W. Bush on Iraq, Afghanistan and anti-terror policies than many of his most ardent supporters were expecting.

When it comes to politics, Obama and his team have proved more comfortable navigating within the Washington system that greeted them than with changing the culture of the capital. A West Wing that features skilled operatives like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and Robert Gibbs is no less politically obsessed than when Karl Rove roamed the same halls.

“I suppose what has surprised me most is how quickly the promises of comity, outreach and post-partisanship were abandoned,” James G. Gimpel, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, said on the Arena forum. “But maybe that’s because I was starting to believe the hype, and I should have maintained an appropriately skeptical stance all along. In this last year, we have again been reminded that governing is not campaigning.”

As it happens, the Obama team is never happier — as in its frequent public disputes with Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or the insurance industry — than when it can adopt campaign-style tactics to frame an adversary for public advantage.

The logic of this approach is clear but also plainly at odds with Obama’s stated desire to unify Americans and drain politics of its anger and addiction to unproductive conflict.

In the year since Election Day, there is scant evidence that Obama remains a movement politician.

The legions of activists and volunteers — the people whose e-mail lists and social-networking skills were supposed to be a potent weapon in Obama’s arsenal during legislative battles — have not made themselves felt in meaningful ways since last year.

And what looked like a transformative result -- an electoral map redrawn by Obama’s ability to mobilize both the Democratic base and post-partisan independents -- now seems more tentative. In 2008, Obama became the first Democrat to win Virginia in 44 years, based on massive turnout from African-Americans and big support from independents. In 2009, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate was routed in Virginia, largely because of lower African-American turnout and a flight of independents toward the Republican. If these trends are repeated nationally in 2010 and Democrats lose significant ground, Obama’s ambitions to be a transformational president most likely will be put on pause. Instead, he’ll be forced to practice a more defensive brand of politics, much like Bill Clinton was after his party was routed in 1994.

In terms of the culture of Washington, he has made it a bit harder for lobbyists to land government jobs (though there have been plenty of exceptions granted to lobbyists Obama happened to especially want). Yet few people in Washington still regard Obama — clearly at ease with establishment values and personalities — as a dangerous boat rocker. The capital remains a bull market for special-interest deal making. The pharmaceutical lobby, for instance, found Obama eager to do business in which drug makers’ interests were protected in exchange for backing health care reform.

This let’s-make-a-deal impulse isn’t pretty to watch sometimes, especially for Obama’s more idealistic followers, but that doesn’t mean it won’t pay off in the end. Obama stands a good chance of passing a health reform bill in coming months, a significant win for the president even if Congress passes only a watered-down version of the bill.

But as the year wears on, there’s a danger for Obama that all that improvisation could start to look feckless, not strategic but simply indecisive or lacking in principles. He has so far avoided falling into the same trap as Clinton, for whom “triangulation” became a defining character trait, an all-purpose explanation for every compromise or centrist impulse or second helping at the dinner table.

Obama’s backtracks are too fresh, and too discreet, to fully define him or become the narrative of his presidency, at least not yet. But he’s edging toward dangerous ground. Nowhere is that clearer than Afghanistan.

He has carried out his deliberations in public view — either an impressive display of confidence by a young president willing to question his commanders’ call for more troops or a slightly unnerving process of recalibration and second-guessing by a leader who set his Afghan strategy just seven months ago. Obama made finishing the war in Afghanistan central to his campaign claims of a muscular foreign policy, but that was before a war-weary public soured so completely on the conflict; and, now, even Obama is showing signs of doubt.

Other Obama lines in the sand are also getting blurred. A one-year deadline to close Guantanamo? It won’t happen. Pass health care before the August recess? Didn’t work out. Crack down on Israeli settlements to restart the Mideast peace process? Not anymore.

The tension between transformational ambitions and conventional instincts even carries over to Obama’s personal style. What happened to the new Camelot that was to dawn over the Potomac?

“I think that was writers planting their hopes on the first couple. I think that was fantasy,” said Carol Joynt, who writes on the Washington scene for the New York Social Diary. “They’re behaving like parents who travel a lot and live in a big house. ... I haven’t seen what some other people got all wound up about. I haven’t seen radical change in fashion. I haven’t seen radical change in the social scene.”

This sense of disappointment, of letdown — how can a campaign that shattered so many expectations have produced a presidency that already feels quite ordinary? — extends from the nearly cosmic to the nearly comical. What could be more conventional — more downright old-fashioned — than a president who likes to golf every Sunday, whose idea of sweeping change extends to lowering his own handicap?

“We thought we were getting a man of action. Instead, we got someone who’ll spend six hours chasing a white ball around a park,” Joe Mathews, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, said, with tongue planted only partly in cheek. “If voters had known about the golf, they would have been less surprised by his lack of urgency on many issues.”

For more commentary, see The Arena .