The euphoria has disappeared as Barack Obama’s first year in office draws to a close. The US president seems to be under fire from within his own ranks as much as from the opposition. Even his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize hasn’t made any difference.

There’s no honeymoon for Mr Obama as far as his Republican opponents are concerned. When he was inaugurated as president he said he was willing to work with the Republican opposition. But immediately after Christmas Day’s failed terrorist attack on a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit, the opposition came down hard on the president.

Pete Hoekstra, an inland security expert for the Republicans in the House of Representatives, accused Mr Obama of not taking seriously enough the protection of his country and fellow Americans:

“He needs to explain that, while this is not a priority. It should be his number one priority.”

Healthcare system
But even quite a few of President Obama’s supporters also have criticisms. The more progressive wing of his following complains that in his first year he has been too accommodating to the right-wing opposition. The leftist Democrat Howard Dean was a presidential candidate in 2004, and until a year ago Chairman of the Democratic Party. Mr Dean says that President Obama has surrendered so much of what his social agenda should have been – the reform of the healthcare system – that he can no longer call it real reform:

"The president said the public option is only five percent. Well, it's the five percent that got the president elected, without this five percent there isn't any reform 'cause you're just tinkering with the present system and expanding it".

Mr Dean is talking about a part of the healthcare debate in which more left-wing voters feel that they have been stabbed in the back by Mr Obama. And he warns that “when just five percent feels dissatisfied, the balance at election time can easily switch to the other side.”

"A good solid B+"
Embittered and aggrieved Republicans on the one side, and disappointed Democrats on the other – yet President Obama said a couple of weeks ago in a TV interview with Oprah Winfrey that he’s not dissatisfied with his first year. He awarded himself "a good solid B+".

The satisfaction lies primarily in his success in preventing a financial and economic catastrophe, Mr Obama told Oprah. But the president is also proud of his progress in difficult international situations and the restoration of the standing of the US in the rest of the world:

"We are on our way out of Iraq, I think we have the best possible plan for Afghanistan and we have reset our image around the world".

 
Legacy
Mr Obama repeated to Oprah Winfrey what he has often said in his first year in office: that he was saddled with enormous problems by his predecessor.

"We have inherited the biggest set of challenges of any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt".

But almost nobody accepts that excuse any more, and it’s completely irrelevant in 2010. The coming year is, above all, an election year. Traditionally, the president’s party loses seats in Congress during his second year in office. Because so many individual election issues of Congressmen and Senators will come into play in the coming months, it will be even harder for President Obama to govern.