All presidents find that events at home and abroad don’t always unfold as they had imagined or hoped. They find that they’re often unable to get things to turn out as they’d like.

This realization seems to have come as something of a surprise to a man who, while campaigning for the office, proclaimed that he was a better speechwriter than his speechwriters and a better political director than his political director.

And who prophesied that his victory would be the moment when the seas stopped rising and the planet began to heal.

Events have taken a different course from what he expected. Obamacare and the stimulus were not met with grateful rapture.

Europeans who once cheered him now call for an American foreign policy that is less, well, European.