THE office of the American presidency famously ages its holder. Reagan entered the White House walking tall and firing one-liners but left it hunched over, his rambling anecdotes going nowhere. Clinton exuded southern charm and virility in 1993, but by the close of the decade seemed purple faced, white-haired and considerably more cantankerous. George W was dopily boyish to start with, but the worries of the Noughties withered even his blithe facade. The wives, from Nancy Reagan to Laura Bush, just became ever more glacial, their rictus grins growing tighter and more inauthentic by the year.

As they sat by the fire before Christmas, being fed marshmallow-soft questions by Auntie Oprah, the ravages of the first year in the White House were not immediately apparent in the softly lit faces of Michelle and Barack Obama. He looked, if anything, better rested and healthier than he had when he first took office. As a couple, they displayed the same chemistry and easy-going combativeness with each other -- the message being that this is a very modern marriage of equals -- and exuded the same hopeful optimism that had entranced America. Perhaps the only discernible difference from a year ago was that she, with her hair swept off her face and elegantly clad in an aubergine-coloured dress by Azzedine Alaia, had become even more glamorous. As Oprah nodded approvingly, Obama stamped a B-plus on his own inaugural report card and Michelle deemed their first year "an amazing, rewarding journey".

Outside of the White House's cosy hearth, however, there has been far less consensus on how well they are doing. Almost from the moment of the inauguration, the conservative demagogues of Fox News daily denounced the president as a socialist who is re-mortgaging America's future. On the subject of foreign policy, detractors in the Republican Party have decried him as a lily-livered appeaser. Former vice-president Dick Cheney has echoed international criticism -- from former Czech president Vaclav Havel among others -- by calling Obama a "ditherer" and publicly jousted with him on a number of occasions. There was dismay, and in some cases disgust, when Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. All of this was to be expected but what was more surprising was that for much of liberal America the sheen seems to have gone off Obama's halo. The brave new world he was supposed to herald has been superseded by the grim reality of Business As Usual.

Four years ago, it became fashionable to deny ever voting for Bush -- today it has become chic to deny ever having fully swallowed the myth that Obama was the Saviour. Summing up the mood of creeping disappointment, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently wrote: "The post-partisan, post-racial, post-Clinton-dysfunction world that Obama was supposed to usher in when he hit town on his white charger, with turtle doves tweeting, has vanished."

This chink in the president's white-knight armour has given the talk-show comedians traction to do something that was deemed almost impossible a year ago: to make fun of Obama. As he took office, glowing with Yes We Can good vibes and shielded by a protective shroud of racial sensitivities, late-night comedic barbs seldom got more pointed than wondering if he was going to be boring compared to the eye-rolling foibles of Bush. Now the zingers come thick and fast, with Bill Maher recently wondering that Obama managed to take time off from the two wars he's conducting to accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

If there has been an almost unmitigated success story of the Obamas' first year, it has surely been Michelle. While his saintly aura has dimmed somewhat she has been built into a mega-brand that is one part Jackie O, one part Oprah -- impossibly glamorous, yet exuding a down-to-earth charm. The New York Times revelation that she was directly descended from a slave girl brought her husband, who has a mixed-race heritage, closer to black America. Her approval ratings have been consistently high, although they are now falling, and she has chosen substantive but fairly safe causes to champion -- mentoring a project for secondary school girls and tackling childhood obesity. Over the year, she has become more cautious in her utterances and her three-woman management team has been careful to avoid the campaign-trail gaffes, which sometimes made her appear tetchy and dour. This has occasionally lead to an embarrassing avoidance of anything even remotely controversial -- she refused to mention a Texas shooting even when asked about it -- but this level of control is to be expected of a First Lady.

Her personal style -- flamboyant but tasteful -- has generally drawn rave reviews and she has created trends as much as set them; for example, her choice of Jason Wu for the inauguration gown created a frenzy at his New York Fashion Week show. When the couple went to Europe in the spring, such was the attention that followed her every hemline and hair flick that it was only half-jokingly suggested that he had accompanied her, rather than the other way around. In April, she went head-to-head with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy in the style stakes at the Palais Rohan in Strasbourg. It was considered a draw.

Even this, however, has been used as corroboration for a charge that has haunted Obama back to his earliest days of his primary campaign -- that he is style over substance. By the day of his inauguration, just under a year ago, the world was prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. There was widespread recognition that he had inherited a steaming mess from the previous administration and there was a sense that the public would give him leeway to solve the huge problems the country was facing.

His first 100 days in office -- a traditional benchmark in American presidential politics -- were a mixed bag. He fulfilled his promises to "reach across the political aisle" appointing a bridge-building cabinet, which featured some Republicans, and inviting former arch-foe Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary Of State. This too brought criticism, as it was felt that he had brought too many "old boys" into the fold. There was further outrage when the President broke his campaign promise to keep lobbyists out of office -- William Lynn, a lobbyist for defence contractor Raytheon, was appointed Deputy Secretary of Defence. To international applause, he quickly banned Bush-era interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, but his promises to close Guantanamo and pull the country out of Iraq were soon qualified with fudging caveats. The "global war on terror" was now called "overseas contingency operations" but amounted to much the same thing.

Obama did manage to push through a $787bn stimulus package, the effects of which are still being debated by economists. Unemployment continued to rise in its wake, but by November the administration claimed that the package had helped to create 650,000 jobs, and certainly it has prevented the recession metastasising into a depression.

As much as Obama (and the world) felt "sobered" by his slow rate of progress, he retained through the early days and beyond, the unprecedented trick of remaining a counter-culture icon while simultaneously holding the office of the most powerful man on earth. From coast to coast, imagery of him as a revolutionary Che Guevara-like figure adorned T-Shirts and dorm-room posters. Artists such as U2 and Beyonce fell over themselves to play at his inauguration (Bush had had to make do with Ricky Martin). At tattoo parlours in New York and Los Angeles his face appeared on buttocks and biceps. Ebony magazine listed him as "one of the top 25 coolest brothers of all time" and John Quelch, a dean at Harvard Business School, wrote: "There are four elements to Obama's cool: he's street cool, family cool, technology cool and culture cool." Not since Eva Peron has the world seen a ruler who so deftly combines hard power with soft street cred.

And like Peron, the president owes some of this almost unprecedented type of popularity to a spouse. Despite Michelle Obama's fancy new clothes and hairdo, somehow in her face and voice you can still see and hear the college girl who became the working mother. The unforgettable image of her standing like some Technicolor Amazon beside the shrunken and grey Queen of England only underlined her modernity. And even as she has broken barriers, such as appearing on last February's Vogue cover, she has prompted flattering comparisons with her predecessors. One commentator contrasted her sunny, almost Facebook-like, smile with the icily regal bearing of Hillary Clinton when she was a Vogue cover girl.

The Obamas are the first First Couple since the Kennedys to have any discernible sexual chemistry, and she pointedly told Oprah that he "still checks her out". She weaves images of familial bliss, with descriptions of the couple's daughters, Sasha and Malia, into interview narratives and was photographed escaping "incognito" with them during one of her husband's European diplomatic jaunts. The public dynamic she and Obama have crafted is one of loving disapproval. Behind-closed-doors arguments are hinted at, but always with the implied happy ending. She will carefully allow select faux-quibbles to float into the public domain -- such as the fact that he doesn't pick up after himself -- the implication being that he is "just like any dad". This tactic, of course, starts from a somewhat condescending premise that we see Obama as an untouchable deity but she and her advisers clearly feel that with the country and the world struggling, the Obama version of the Camelot myth needs occasional dabs of contrived domesticity.

As the year progressed, and both grew into their new roles, it became clear that far from being the radical liberal that the Right had tried to warn America about, or the cool Black Power avenger that T-shirt makers cast him as, Obama was actually much more a man of the establishment. He changed the emphasis of foreign policy, for instance, but only back to more moderate practices after years of extreme neo-con hawkishness (no danger of Hillary sticking a flower in the barrel of a North Korean tank any time soon). He pushed for a deal in the Copenhagen climate conference but this was only remarkable in the context of years of disastrously isolationist policies by the Bush administration -- and he spent only one day at the conference. Even with the wind solidly at his back and several states passing gay marriage laws, he refused to rock the Evangelist boat with a definite statement on the issue. He has surrounded himself with many of the same people who advised previous administrations and always seems acutely aware that politics is the art of the possible.

If anything, Obama's milk-and-water caution has hindered the broad ambitions of his administration. Critics point out that the stimulus was not bold enough -- not enough money was provided and unemployment continued to rise after it was pushed though. The banking bailout left Wall Street, if anything, less accountable. In Iraq, he gave the army more troops but not as many as the generals said they would need to be effective. His health care bill, will be considered a coup if it makes it over all the legislative hurdles, but some of those who have to buy health insurance out of their own pocket still won't be able to afford insurance under the plan.

Throughout all of this, Obama displayed a type of calculating dispassion which many have found irritating. While initially there was relief that the Bush-era anti-intellectualism was a thing of the past, many pundits now deride Obama as a "professorial president" (shades there of the peculiarly American mistrust of academia). After his decision to allow the self-confessed September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be tried in the civilian court system he was accused of showing "too much head, too little gut". The rainbows and doves inspiration that he provided during the primary campaigns seems to have been subsumed into his natural political wonk tendencies. In late 2008, the Daily Telegraph obtained a private letter from the British Ambassador to the US to Gordon Brown. It described Obama as a man who can "assiduously sit on the fence, balancing the pro and cons" with a personality that "does betray a highly educated and upper-class mindset," a man who can "talk too dispassionately." At a time when a nation is turning its lonely eyes to him, it is felt in many quarters that Obama needs to rediscover some of that campaign trail magic.

Undoubtedly, one of the biggest changes that the Obamas have wrought in their first year in office is in the area of race relations. Race is to the United States as class is to Britain -- and an outsider cannot begin to understand how sensitive a subject it is (as tenor Ronan Tynan recently found out). According to a New York Times poll, perceptions of race relations vastly improved for every minority group during the first six months of Obama's presidency. Anecdotally, it was to be observed that the roles played by black people in television programmes have increased (a black president is no longer science-fiction shorthand for "the distant future") and improved since he has been elected. Many major companies, including Budweiser, have also launched advertising campaigns featuring a black cast.

In July, when a white cop in Massachusetts arrested a black professor on his own property, Obama initially weighed in by saying the cop had "acted stupidly" but later apologised and invited both to a conciliatory "beer summit" at the White House. The revelation that Michelle may have had a slave-owner ancestor provided an even more powerful marker of what the First Lady herself called the "tangled history of slavery and race relations" in the US.

As his first year winds to a close, the disappointment that Obama has not done more has been tempered by a sense of wait-and-see. Both Newsweek ("Yes He Can -- But He Hasn't Yet") and Time magazines have recently run sympathetic pieces, pointing out that a year is an artificial marker and that it is far too early in the president's term to begin to assess what his eventual progress will be. While he has been less than decisive in certain areas, in the long run it may seem prudent to defer more controversial issues such as fighting the expansion of Israel's West Bank settlements until later in his presidency. If, as seems likely, he manages to enact his planned health care reforms before the anniversary of his inauguration, then history may improve on the moderate-to-good grade he gave himself before Oprah's friendly tribunal.

In the coming years, Obama may have to choose between his lofty Audacity of Hope ideals and the fiddly pragmatism needed to push through real change. For now, America and the world will react much as the Queen of England reacted when Michelle Obama breached protocol and slung an arm over the royal shoulder: watchful, wide-eyed and ultimately giving the benefit of the doubt.

- Donal Lynch

Sunday Independent