Obama's record looks strikingly different than the one he imagined when he took office. | AP Photos 10 quotes that haunt Obama

Ahead in the polls, looking strong in key swing states: This must be exactly what Barack Obama dreamed his reelection campaign would look like, five weeks from Election Day and on the eve of the first debate.

But, as the president and his team well know, Obama in Denver on Wednesday will be defending a first-term record that looks strikingly different than the one he imagined when he took office in January 2009.


( Also on POLITICO: POLITICO’s Swing-State map)

Obama’s own words, and those of his closest aides, culled from his first campaign and the early phase of his presidency, tell the story. Cumulatively, the quotations are an anthology of lofty aspirations that fell to earth and boastful predictions that didn’t come true.

All presidents have plans that don’t work out. But many of Obama’s off-the-mark quotes echo because — as a president with a short history in Washington and no previous executive experience — he faced an especially jarring collision between his confident assumptions about how he would govern and the reality of what was possible.

The economy and other problems were more impervious to Obama’s remedies than he expected; Washington, and the rest of the world, were less impressed by the purity of his intentions than he imagined. He is certain to be confronted with many of these contradictions by Mitt Romney in Wednesday’s encounter.

( Also on POLITICO: 2012 presidential debate schedule)

What follows are 10 quotations — some famous, some not — that Obama surely hopes voters won’t dwell on as he makes his case for a second term.

• “Washington is broken. My whole campaign has been premised from the start on the idea that we have to fundamentally change how Washington works.”

Obama delivered those words on Sept. 11, 2008, at a ServiceNation summit. He has said similar things on countless occasions, starting with the 2004 Democratic keynote address in Boston that vaulted the then-state senator to national acclaim.

There is little doubt that Obama was sincere in his belief that Washington is driven by irrational partisanship. He was sincere also in believing that the power of his own cool and cerebral example would help drain the capital of malice and rebuild a rational center.

In retrospect, Obama’s exaggerated belief in his own capacity to transform Washington — not to mention his own wavering self-discipline in resisting nakedly partisan politics — looks like his most naïve miscalculation about his own power.

Obama himself has embraced this conclusion — albeit slowly.

In a December 2011 interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Obama said he had not miscalculated how difficult it would be to change Washington: “I didn’t overpromise. And I didn’t underestimate how tough this was gonna be.”

In an interview last month with “60 Minutes,” Obama said he had miscalculated: “I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest … I haven’t fully accomplished that. Haven’t even come close in some instances. And, you know, if you ask me what’s my biggest disappointment [it] is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.”

( Also on POLITICO: Obama vs. Obama at debates)

• “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

This quote was attributed to Obama by Patrick Gaspard, who was Obama’s first White House political director, in an interview with The New Yorker in November 2008.

Obama biographers and even friends have noted his tendency from a young age to sometimes to let self-confidence curdle into excessive self-regard — a trait he will try to suppress in Denver.

But the main problem with Obama’s quote was not that it was immodest but that it was inaccurate.

Obama has not presided over an especially skilled political operation. Relations with key members of Congress and with key political figures in states have been frayed, driven by complaints that Obama does not do enough outreach and political fence-tending.

As for his speechifying talents, while obviously formidable on some occasions, they have not added up to effective presidential communication.

This is Obama’s own self-appraisal in a recent interview. “It’s funny — when I ran, everybody said, ‘Well, he can give a good speech but can he actually manage the job?’” he told CBS in July. “And in my first two years, I think the notion was, ‘Well, he’s been juggling and managing a lot of stuff, but where’s the story that tells us where he’s going?’ And I think that was a legitimate criticism.”

• “If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

In this quote, from a February 2009 interview on NBC’s “Today” show and widely repeated this year by taunting Republicans, Obama was referring to the pace of economic recovery.

Obama’s explanation, of course, is that his policies, including the $787 billion stimulus package, averted depression and made possible a slow but still incomplete comeback.

But the words haunt Obama because they were a reminder of how profoundly he and his economic team misunderstood the long-term nature of the crisis that confronted them upon taking office.

Christina Romer, then the West Wing’s economist, forecast in January 2009 that the unemployment rate would be around 5.5 percent by the third quarter of 2012 if a large stimulus package passed. It is currently 8.1 percent. Former budget director Peter Orszag explained after leaving office that economic models led the administration to expect that the economy would look like a “V” — a steep decline followed by a steep rebound — and instead it was more like an “L,” a sharp drop followed by a long period of flat growth.

If Obama had seen the future, he would have sought to shape public expectations, and might even have delayed expensive and arguably growth-slowing measures like his overhaul of health care in favor of more measures to coax job creation.

• “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and a way that Bill Clinton did not.”

That quote, to the Reno Gazette-Journal in January 2008, was designed partly to taunt Hillary Rodham Clinton during Obama’s nomination fight against her.

But it’s also plain that Obama really believed this. It often seemed like Obama and his top aides couldn’t decide what they disliked more — George W. Bush’s policies or Bill Clinton’s politics.

David Axelrod, Obama’s top political adviser, thought Clinton stood for a small and contrived brand of politics, the kind that doesn’t make history.

Obama has overcome his doubts. A TV commercial with Clinton endorsing Obama is among the most widely played of this cycle, and Clinton’s spirited address at last month’s Democratic convention played a central role in the bounce Obama enjoyed coming out of Charlotte.

It was another lesson in humility for Obama, who learned that the 42nd president knew a few things about how a Democratic president can navigate in a country that still has a center-right political culture.

• “Guantanamo will be closed no later than one year from now.”

This comes from comments to reporters after signing an executive order on his third day in office.

Here is a bogus prediction — turned out the administration had no good ideas of what to do with these terrorism detainees — that isn’t necessarily causing great problems for Obama. It’s not like Romney is running to Obama’s left on Gitmo.

To the contrary, the fact that there was more continuity than reversal of Bush-era surveillance, detention and other anti-terrorism policies is one reason Obama has flipped the historical advantage that Republicans usually have in polls about which party people trust more to keep the country safe.

Obama likewise essentially borrowed Bush’s Iraq surge strategy for Afghanistan, with mixed results.

That’s a funny bounce of the ball for someone who won his party’s nomination partly on the strength of anti-war support. Obama must have new appreciation for what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. meant when he said, “The future outwits all our certitudes.”

• “I think that health care, over time, is going to become more popular.”

Not really. A little, at best.

The quote in this case actually comes from Axelrod on NBC’s “Meet the Press” in September 2010, a half-year after the overhaul of health care passed with an all-Democrats strategy, and a couple months before the Republican takeover of Congress, fueled in part by an “Obamacare” backlash.

But there is no question the sentiment was shared by Obama himself, who placed his chips on the health care square early in his presidency. He always knew it would be politically difficult to pass. The assumption, though, was that the legislation would be much more popular — a true accomplishment to run on for reelection — once it became law.

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows that a plurality — 45 percent to 40 percent — have a favorable view of the health care legislation. That’s a reversal from before, but the support is hardly strong enough to make passage a key part of Obama’s reelection appeal.

Obama’s errant assumptions about the politics of health care shaped his presidency in other ways. Recall the “big bang” strategy from 2009. The plan was that his first year in office would produce a trio of legislative achievements: reform of health care, reform of the financial services sector and a cap-and-trade measure to limit carbon emissions. The idea was that victory would beget victory, and that a rapid string of first-year successes would infuse years two, three and four of his presidency with even greater momentum.

Obama achieved two of the three — cap and trade fell by the wayside — though it took longer than expected. But far from generating new momentum, each victory drained his political capital. The result is that Obama has had few big domestic policy achievements since 2010.

• “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

Obama maintains that these words about gay marriage were not his own when they appeared in a Chicago gay newspaper, Outlines, in 1996, when he was running for an Illinois state Senate seat. A candidate survey was supposedly filled out in error by a staff member.

The words sting even so. Obama has said that his views on gay rights, like those of many Americans, are “evolving.” But there weren’t many Americans evolving toward a less tolerant position, which is what Obama seemed to be for much of his term. Until this summer, Obama was on record opposed to gay marriage, a position that had him to the right of Dick Cheney.

He changed that in a May interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, essentially adapting the Cheney view of gay marriage — personally in favor, but regarding it as a state matter. The political calculation behind Obama’s view was made plain by the statements of White House aides who said the president’s timing was forced by spontaneous comments from Vice President Joe Biden. Obama had planned to wait before clarifying his views until around the Democratic convention.

Obama was praised for making history with his interview. But the degree of caution in his hedged endorsement has left his position still something of a muddle. A politician in the 1960s who said he was personally opposed to segregation but that the matter should be left to the states would not have been praised for bravery. And it seems likely that Obama’s position will evolve even further over time.

• “It’s here that companies like Solyndra are leading the way toward a brighter and more prosperous future.”

This one is a gotcha that is almost too easy. The problems with one corporation don’t necessarily speak to the viability of a broader energy policy.

There were already red flags in May 2010 when the president went to speak at Solyndra’s headquarters in Fremont, Calif. The company went belly up after winning $535 million in taxpayer-funded loan guarantees from the administration.

On the positive side of the ledger, independent analysts say Obama has at least plausibly followed through on his 2009 promise to “double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.” According to Energy Information Administration data on new electricity generation, the U.S. is on pace by the end of this year to have doubled its wind capacity and increase its solar capacity four-fold. Geothermal and biomass — two other forms of renewable energy — will be at roughly the same levels as 2009.

But Obama is going to eat his Solyndra quote for at least a while longer. Romney attacks him on this regularly, and the House GOP’s campaign arm is citing the failed company aggressively in some races.

• “I fought with you in the Senate for comprehensive immigration reform. And I will make it a top priority in my first year as President.”

It’s possible Obama at least suspected this promise was B.S. when he made it speaking to the National Council of La Raza in San Diego in July 2008. There was hardly a feint of effort in his first year of pushing the issue to passage.

Speaking to Univision, the Hispanic news network, two weeks ago, Obama blamed first the bad economy for diverting his attention in 2009, and then Republicans for politicizing the issue: “What I confess I did not expect — and so I’m happy to take responsibility for being naïve here — is that Republicans who had previously supported comprehensive immigration reform — my opponent in 2008, who had been a champion of it and who attended these meetings — suddenly would walk away.”

• “ What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further. We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else’s.”

Obama was talking about the growing expense of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security, and in his Jan. 15, 2009, interview, five days before taking office, he vowed he was ready to make the tough calls.

A little more than a month later, in February 2009, Obama struck a similar tone at a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” at the White House: “I’m pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office.”

So far, entitlement reform hasn’t happened, nor has serious deficit reduction. Obama claims he tried to do both things, but was stymied by Republicans who were opposed to making any revenue increases part of the solution.

For now, the only chance that these problems get solved by Obama “under my watch” is if he convinces enough viewers on Wednesday, and enough voters in November, that both his past record and future intentions — no matter how many errant predictions along the way — merit another four years.