When Barack Obama won the US presidency his staff played Bruce Springsteen’s Rising at ear-splitting volume for the crowds that filled downtown Chicago. A year on he hears Hail to the Chief wherever he goes, and constant questions about what, exactly, the Chief wants to do.

No new President has been the subject of such extragavant expectations, and none has tantalised his admirers with more promises that have yet to be fulfilled. From Capitol Hill to the Hindu Kush — and at polling stations across America yesterday — Mr Obama is confronting the differences between campaigning and power.

He has frustrated his progressive base with his timid use of Democratic majorities in Congress, and enraged the paranoid hard-Right, which accuses him of closet Marxism for contemplating public health insurance. He has played more golf in nine months than his predecessor did in eight years, yet by any reasonable standard he has been maniacally busy.

Unlike Bill Clinton, Mr Obama entered the White House with many senior posts in his Administration already filled. On his first day in office he ordered that the Guantánamo Bay detention centre be closed within a year. He will probably miss that deadline but the announcement set the tone for a comprehensive makeover of America’s image abroad.

Though accused of a certain vanity as the star of Washington’s new Camelot, he has “injected humility as a new element in US foreign policy”, according to a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

That humility was articulated in speeches in Prague, where he buried Bush-era unilateralism, and Cairo, where he pledged amity with the Muslim faith and startled the Iranian leadership with the declaration that “no single nation should pick and choose which nation holds nuclear weapons”.

Foreign policy hawks in Washington have since seized on every sign that foreign governments may be taking advantage of White House naivety. There is no shortage of evidence, from Tehran’s foot-dragging on a uranium export deal to Russia’s reluctance to support stiffer sanctions on Iran despite Mr Obama’s scrapping of a European missile defence shield.

The only concrete dividend for Mr Obama’s switch to soft power when hard did not seem to be working came in a 3am phone call to the White House on October 9. Robert Gibbs, Mr Obama’s press secretary, told him he had won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Republicans alleged an international plot to subordinate the US to “a global agenda of redistribution”, and received a spike in campaign contributions. Mr Obama said that he did not deserve the prize. The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision reflected a sense of relief still not understood widely inside the US at the presence of such an inclusive American leader on the world stage.

His first domestic coup was to force through passage of a $787 billion Bill to bail out failing banks and stimulate a US economy that appeared to be grinding to a halt nine months ago.

The stimulus Bill has swollen a $1.4 trillion deficit and will burden future generations of taxpayers even though it has already enriched some of the financiers who helped to trigger the recession. Critics claim that each job it has created has cost $160,000 in public funds, yet even they concede that without Mr Obama’s lead the slump could have been far worse.

America’s GDP grew by 3.5 per cent year on year in the last quarter, beating expectations by a quarter of a percentage point. The proportion of voters who believe that the economy should be Mr Obama’s top priority has fallen from 60 to 40 per cent since he took office.

Any recovery now under way is fragile and largely jobless, with unemployment more than 10 per cent in 14 states, and Detroit, home to the bankrupt US auto industry, a tableau of misery. A recovery of some sort is a pre-requisite for the trillion-dollar healthcare Bill on which the President has staked his reformist credentials; for financial regulatory reform that must be palatable to Wall Street; and for climate change legislation that the Administration is pitching to a sceptical public as part of a wholesale switch to green energy sources.

The rancorous debate on health reform sailed past an August deadline that Mr Obama’s top adviser admits was unrealistic. Yet he is closer to a meaningful Bill than any of his predecessors, including Theodore Roosevelt. Whatever version the President eventually signs — by Christmas Eve, he hopes — will be hailed as historic. His strategists are counting on it to neutralise the criticism that he is too moderate to deliver on his more grandiose promises. In a best-case scenario a healthcare victory would give him the momentum to pass regulatory reform and climate change Bills in time for next year’s midterm elections.

Two months ago the comedic elite that staffs NBC’s Saturday Night Live declared Mr Obama’s honeymoon over and mocked him for failing to accomplish anything. Left-wing Democrats hoping for an elective dictatorship to tame US capitalism and socialise medicine will have to dream on. The man they voted into office is a determined centrist who prides himself on staying calm under pressure and seeking consensus in Washington and abroad.

He has failed to find consensus with his commanding general in Afghanistan. He may yet be taken for a ride by Tehran and even Russia’s biddable President Medvedev. He is greyer and, some say, thinner than on his victory night, but probably also wiser. His ambition has outstripped his record of accomplishment but nothing he has done in the past year rules out redressing that balance in the next three.

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