Yet the emerging doubts about Obama among even his most ardent and sensible fans are deeper and more nuanced than that. After 300-plus days in office, the president remains, for many of his supporters, a worryingly indistinct figure. One whose pragmatic sensibility is crystal clear but bedrock convictions are still blurry. And whose White House has proved less than fully adept at the marriage of politics and policy, preferring all too often to fall back on their boss’s charm and dazzle to advance the ball upfield.

“I have no idea what they believe,” a leading House Democrat and Obama ally told me recently when I asked if he could define the administration’s governing philosophy. “I know that their governing strategy seems to be, ‘Don’t worry, the big guy will make it all right in the end.’ They have the sublime sense that they don’t have to do all that much to plan events, or to come up with the message for what they’re doing, or to line up support, because whenever they need to, they can just put Mike Tyson in the ring. And I think (a) it’s wrong, and (b) it’s a bad way to run a White House.”…

“What Obama is learning,” says a prominent Democrat and Clinton-administration veteran, “is that it’s easier to get elected out of nowhere than it is to govern from nowhere.”…

But the creeping disappointment in Obama is rooted in something deeper and more inchoate than his stances on the issues or his legislative strategies. It has to do with his inevitable and inexorable demystification—his transformation from a fantasy superman into something more ordinary. “The United States, with its powers of marketplace imagination and corresponding historical amnesia, is tremendously good at turning yesterday’s extraordinary change into tomorrow’s quotidian commodity for sale,” observes a Democratic activist ruefully. “Which is what I fear is happening to Obama: He’s pretty much becoming another president, a picture on a coffee mug.”