The hopes invested in Barack Obama at his inauguration were as overblown as the disenchantment that now surrounds his first anniversary in the White House. He has failed, inevitably, to live up to the electrifying standards of his campaign rhetoric. Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, once observed that ‘‘you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose,’’ and that has been truer for Obama than for most of his predecessors. Yet to write off his first year as a failure would be absurdly harsh. It has been disappointing, maybe, but no disgrace.

In assessing his performance, we must remember the enormous symbolic significance of his election to the highest office in the United States. It went some way toward rectifying what Condoleezza Rice, another high-achieving black politician, has described as ‘‘America’s birth defect.’’ Nor should we forget what an appalling hand Obama was dealt. The legacy of the Bush years two wars and an economic collapse could hardly have been more poisonous. ...

Overseas, Obama’s rhetoric has been faultless notably the speech in Cairo on America’s relationship with the Muslim world but the delivery deeply disappointing. On Iran and the Middle East there has been scant progress, and he dithered interminably before ordering the Afghan surge. He also returned empty-handed from his winter visits to Beijing and Copenhagen.

Obama is a deep thinker who can at times appear smug. He can also as with his response to the earthquake in Haiti be supremely decisive (prompting ludicrous accusations from the French that America was throwing its weight around). Our advice for his second year? Talk less and try to do fewer things better.