Quotes of the Day

"Look," the President said. "Even if we hadn't tackled health care, this was going to be a tough year." We were in the Oval Office, talking about how health care reform had become such a mess. It was the Friday before his first anniversary in office, the Friday before a Republican named Scott Brown demolished the assumptions of Barack Obama's presidency by winning Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and ending the Democrats' filibuster-proof dominance. It was a Friday when the President's decision to go all in on health care was beginning to seem like a disastrous gamble.

I asked Obama how he thought his Administration was perceived by someone in the Boston suburbs who had supported him a year ago, looking for "change" — and now saw the President making deals with everyone from Joe Lieberman to the labor unions to Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska (whose special Medicaid deal was a public embarrassment) to the pro-life forces, not to mention the drug and insurance companies. "When I promised change, I didn't promise that somehow members of Congress weren't going to be looking to try to get a project in their district or help a hospital in their neighborhood," the President said halfheartedly. But later he acknowledged, "There's a culture in this town, which is an insider culture. That's what I think people outside of Washington legitimately can't stand — a sense that they're not being heard. I think we've done actually a pretty good job of working in this town without being completely consumed by it. But from the outside, if you're just watching TV, and all you're hearing about is the reports, people may get the false impression that somehow [the insiders] are the folks we're spending more time listening to."

But how false an impression is it? The President insisted, lamely, that he spends plenty of time hearing from average Americans. But he seemed to spend as much time overseas during his first year as he did traveling the country, experiencing the economic anguish firsthand. And he seems to have fallen headlong into the muck and madness of Washington, pursuing a historic goal — universal health care — that is certainly worthy, and central to his party's unfinished legacy, and crucial to the country's long-term economic future, but peripheral to most Americans, who have relentlessly told pollsters, by huge majorities, that they are happy with the health care they currently receive and far more worried about other things. On this defining issue, the President and his party have lost touch with the country.

Which was unfortunate, because he has done a great many other things very well. Obama was right, of course, about the troubles he faced when he took the oath on Jan. 20, 2009. He came to the presidency at a moment of crisis, in the midst of a financial collapse and two wars. He acted with purposeful restraint to help stabilize a juddering economy. Overseas, he quickly restored diplomacy to its rightful place at the center of U.S. foreign policy while moving aggressively to combat al-Qaeda and its allies in Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan. Almost all his choices were controversial — an economic-stimulus package that was called too small by some and too large by others, the Afghan escalation, an effort to address climate change that was also called too weak by some and too radical by others — but none of them were dishonorable. His has been a serious and substantive presidency. But the question, a year in, is whether it has been politically tone-deaf — and why the best presidential orator in a generation finds it so hard to explain himself to the American people.

Health care reform has clearly been at the heart of the Administration's troubles. The President cited three problems that bedeviled the process. The first was context: his plan would cost nearly $100 billion a year — in fairness, he was also proposing ways to pay for it — and regulate one-sixth of the economy just after he had spent $787 billion on a stimulus package that most Americans didn't really understand, and hundreds of billions more to bail out predator banks, which most Americans didn't understand, either. It seemed profligate, even though Obama could argue, rightly, that the bailouts and stimulus were needed to stanch the economic hemorrhage, and that in the long run, his health care reform was the first step toward containing costs and getting the national debt back under control after the Bush Administration had blown apart the Clinton Administration's admirable budget discipline.

The second problem was the Republican Party. Obama came to office attempting bipartisanship. The Republicans weren't buying. "The classic example being me heading over to meet with the House Republican caucus to discuss the stimulus," the President said, "and finding out that [minority leader John] Boehner had already released a statement saying, We're going to vote against the bill before we've even had a chance to exchange ideas."

Instead of recalibrating right then and there, Obama decided to push ahead with health care. There were a handful of Republicans, led by the two Senators from Maine, who seemed committed to voting for a reasonable plan. But the atmosphere deteriorated over the summer as the Republicans took a turn toward nihilism. They demagogued nonexistent provisions of the bill, like "death panels." By August, the President was saying privately that he didn't know if bipartisanship was possible when the polls said that a third of the opposition party didn't even think he was an American citizen. The few Republicans pretending to discuss health care reform, especially those on the Senate Finance Committee, stalled. "The whole thing went on too long," says Senator Sherrod Brown, a liberal from Ohio. "[Finance Committee chairman] Max Baucus wasted three months trying to negotiate with six Republican Senators." The longer the process went on, the more the guts and fat of the bill were exposed to public scrutiny. The historic reforms — the fact that insurance companies would no longer be able to deny coverage to anyone, the fact that individuals and small businesses would be able to shop for insurance and pay less in health care superstores, the fact that the poor would have their coverage subsidized — took a backseat. "There is no doubt," the President told me, "that ... having this intense a focus on the sausage-making process in Congress is never helpful."

And that was the third problem: the focus on sausage making was unavoidable, given that health care aroused almost every special interest extant in Washington. The President insisted to me that, despite the compromises, the bill was sound. He even insisted that it still would pass. But that was before Massachusetts. Now it seems likely that the heroes on Capitol Hill will head for the hills rather than take a risky vote in an election year. "It's going to get very ugly for a while," says a close aide to the President. Obama will have to transform himself — but will he be a more cautious politician, or a bolder one to meet the populist anger of the times?

By the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton had come to the conclusion that he made two big mistakes in his own near fatal push to enact health care reform. One was to go whole hog, all at once, rather than try for incremental change that would slowly transform the system. The Rube Goldberg machinery of governance in Washington was just too convoluted and rust-ridden to handle something so huge in one giant bite. The other mistake was political: a dozen years after Ronald Reagan was elected President, the public still believed, as Reagan said in his Inaugural, that "government is the problem," not the solution to the country's difficulties. Clinton realized, too late, that he should have focused on governing effectively first. He later told me he should have built public trust by taking on the welfare system, which middle-class voters saw as rife with corruption, before trying anything as ambitious as health care (welfare reform proved to be one of Clinton's most popular, and effective, achievements).

The parallels between Clinton and Obama in their first years are striking. Both passed significant economic legislation — Clinton passed an economic package, complete with tax increase, that set it on a path toward the balanced budgets of his second term — despite a stone wall of Republican opposition. Both were driven by ambition and high-mindedness to chase the health care phantasm. And both seemed to lose track of basic gutbucket politics in the process.

In a way, and despite the stubborn jobless economic recovery, Obama is in a stronger political position than Clinton was. He has had his debacle earlier. He has the rest of the year — a millennium in politics — to move in a direction that is more likely to gain immediate public approval and limit the expected damage in the 2010 congressional elections. (Clinton lost both houses in the Republican tidal wave of 1994.) And Obama has a weapon that could be as potent as welfare reform: public anger at Wall Street and the big banks that responded to public largesse by awarding themselves historic bonuses this year. He has already begun this fight, calling for a tax on the largest banks to recoup the money lost in the bailouts. That's a good idea, but it's insufficient: a major campaign has to be waged against the unregulated financial casino games, the exotic investment vehicles that created enormous paper profits and helped bring on the collapse. Aides say that in recent meetings with his economic advisers, Obama has been tilting toward former Fed chairman Paul Volcker — who has been outspoken against the Wall Street antics — and away from Lawrence Summers and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who were intimately involved in the deregulation of Wall Street. "He's definitely going to side with Volcker on trying to make sure that banks concentrate on traditional banking," an Obama aide told me.

Another way for Obama to regain popularity would be to acknowledge the public dismay with Big Government. A renewed campaign for fiscal discipline will be announced in the State of the Union speech, but it's also possible that the President will push back against the myopic and solipsistic members of Congress, in both parties, who did so much to make health care reform a mess. "We've had to hold fire on the Congress," says an aide. "We've lashed ourselves to them in order to get health care passed. Politically, that's been like having Bernie Madoff in the Cabinet." It is likely that one of Obama's most popular campaign proposals — a national infrastructure bank that would take the big projects out of the hands of congressional porkmongers — will be revived this year. But even as he pivots toward populism, this famously no-drama, intellectual President is going to have to find the voice, and the political instincts, to sell it.

On the morning he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama met with a nervous group of aides. The award might be a political problem, they said. It might be ridiculed. He hadn't achieved any of his foreign policy goals yet. "It is kind of crazy," Obama acknowledged with a laugh, "but that's not the real problem we're facing here. How do you accept the Nobel Peace Prize when you're the Commander in Chief of a military that is fighting two wars?"

The President's next meeting was about one of those wars — the one in Afghanistan — with his National Security Council in the Situation Room. Everyone stood as the President entered. "I was waiting for people to start applauding or someone to say, 'Congratulations, Mr. President,' or something like that," an aide recalls. "But no one said anything, and the President didn't say anything about the prize either. He just started in on the agenda."

Taken together, these two meetings speak to an abiding enigma of the Obama presidency. From the start, the President has been the impassive receptacle of passionate hopes and impossible expectations — from the expectations of the American people after a wildly emotional election victory and Inauguration to those of the Nobel Committee. There is an essential disconnect here, an emotional distance from the public, an emotional distance from his own staff. Take the National Security Council meeting after he won the prize: Clinton would have hugged everyone in sight; George W. Bush would have made a self-deprecating C-student joke; Reagan might have said, "First, I'd like to thank the Academy ..." The only recent Presidents who might have responded as aridly as Obama did were Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush, both replaced by world-class emoters after one term. "He is a classic loner," says a politician who helped coach Obama for debates during the campaign. "Usually, you work hard at prep, and then everyone, including the candidate, kicks back and has a meal together. Obama would go off and eat by himself. He is very self-contained. He is not needy."

Unlike most politicians, Obama doesn't thrive on sycophancy; he mistrusts it. That's why no one in the Situation Room congratulated him on the prize. And he's not very good at faking the hail-fellow camaraderie that is part of American public life, either. He doesn't seem to enjoy the game of politics all that much. In his memoir of the 2008 presidential race, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says his candidate grew "increasingly sullen" on the road during the early months of the campaign. Communications director Robert Gibbs asked Obama if he was having any fun at all. No, Obama replied. Was there anything that could be done to make it more fun? Again, the answer was no. "He found most [media] coverage of the race banal," Plouffe writes. "And there wasn't nearly enough time for his favorite part of the campaign — noodling over policy, or, as he called it, think time."

Does this matter? In a high-minded, policy-driven world, it wouldn't. But we don't live there. The presidency exists in a show-biz maelstrom — especially now, with an opposition party that simply refuses to participate in governing the country, barnacled special interests that detour and distend any attempts at major legislation, and noxious, shortsighted media that convey heat more accurately than they do light. In such an atmosphere, the President has to convey a little heat too. He has to be as concerned with stagecraft, political appearances, feel-your-pain empathy as he is with substance. That seems like an effort for Obama. In his first meeting with aides on his Nobel morning, he skipped past the political question — How could they react to the perception that the prize was premature? — to the heart of the matter: What was the rationale for a war President to receive a peace prize? This led directly to the most memorable passage of his Nobel lecture, about the need to combat the evil that exists in the world, a passage celebrated by his domestic friends and foes alike. But his eloquence will be remembered fondly in history only if Obama himself is — and not just as the first of his race but as one who led the nation through a difficult time. "To lead successfully," an Administration official told me, "you have to convince people that you're with them, that you get their problems right down to your gut."

Two days after we spoke in the Oval Office, the President gave a lovely speech — the kind he does so well — at the Vermont Avenue Baptist Church in Washington. He even lifted the mask a bit. "You know, folks ask me sometimes why I look so calm." The audience laughed, and he continued, "They say, All this stuff coming at you, how come you just seem calm? And I have a confession to make here. There are times where I'm not so calm ... There are times when progress seems too slow. There are times when the words that are spoken about me hurt. There are times when the barbs sting. There are times when it feels like all these efforts are for naught, and change is so painfully slow in coming, and I have to confront my own doubts. But let me tell you — during those times, it's faith that keeps me calm."

After a year of "think time" on serious policy issues, the President faces a very different landscape in 2010. He will have to go to battle, shedding his preternatural calm at times, and fight to regain the public trust. He will have to be more politician than policymaker — and yet remain true to his values in the process. He will have to understand that in the poisonous atmosphere of American politics, triumphs are no longer a realistic possibility; survival is as good as it gets.

• Joe Klein