It`s been a year since Barack Obama stood on a stage in Chicago`s Grant Park on a balmy November night and made Americans feel, for a little while at least, that their world wasn`t coming down around their ears.

It was a brief speech by Obama standards but laden with the dreamy, tranquilizing platitudes Americans wanted so badly, at least back then.

Here was a man, whose very appearance screamed change, talking about how `young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native-American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled` had come together and shown that America is not a country of two polarities left and right but rather a truly United States.

People wept. Oprah Winfrey, down on the grass in the special VIP section, hugged somebody and wept.

And now here we are, a year later. All those millions of humid, enthusiastic Obamaniacs have calmed down `gone to sleep,` in the words of Pew pollster Andrew Kohut and everybody knows that nothing much has transformed at all.

It`s become almost clich to rattle off all the things Obama and the Democrats have not done. But for the record:

No new environmental policy, no new energy policy, no new policy on dealing with 11 million illegal immigrants. No end to many of the federal government`s bigoted policies toward gays. No universal health care (though a massive bill is on the congressional table).

There has also been no end to American agents kidnapping people in other countries. Nor to the American drones that are still bombing the border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, killing civilians in the process.

One hundred and seventeen thousand troops remain in Iraq. Obama is considering sending 40,000 more into Afghanistan.

He has made good on his commitment to be nicer to the rest of the world, for which he promptly won a Nobel Peace Prize.

But as for most of the other promises? He counsels patience these days, rather than hope.
Now, part of this standstill is because of the division of powers in the U.S.

As James Thurber, a presidential historian at American University here in Washington, put it: `If he was king and we had a revolution against the king, so we don`t like that idea if he was king, he could get those things through.`

Thurber says Obama has made some changes, mostly by edict: He cites 29 in total, notably the reversal of the Bush-era ban on funding stem cell research, and a re-outlawing of torture, a practice the Bush administration embraced.

Obama also continued the bank rescues begun by his predecessor, which seemed to stabilize the U.S. economy back in the spring.

As for the big promises, says Thurber: `This is a representative democracy with lots of different interests that disagree with him. And that`s what he`s experiencing.`

Of course, Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, knew all about the division of power when he was making all those promises.
But it wouldn`t be a problem, he assured everybody, because he, Obama, the great mediator, would bring together the right and left in some sort of modern-day healing circle and the old deadlocks would crumble.
But, as it turns out, Obama not just failed to win over Republicans, he hasn`t even been able to corral the so-called `blue-dog` conservatives in his own party.

Once they sensed that all the euphoria of the presidential win was wearing off, some Democrats turned their attention to getting re-elected themselves, in the process defying him, especially on economic issues.

And with some reason.

Obama, in fact, has continued the wild spending his Republican predecessor began in order to try to keep the economy from tipping into the abyss, or melting down, or imploding, to use the doomsday parlance of a year ago.

As a result, the American national debt is $12 trillion and climbing.

The deficit for the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30 was $1.4 trillion, which means the U.S. government borrowed more that year than Canada`s entire economic output.

Economists expect trillion-dollar-plus deficits for years to come.
Just last month, one of Obama`s economic advisers, Christina Romer, told the nation that the fantastically expensive stimulus program has pretty much had its effect.

It probably won`t result in much growth next year, she predicted. Which poses the perfectly reasonable question: If only $194 billion of the stimulus money has been spent so far, and there will be no further impact, why keep spending the other $600 billion or so?

As Harvard University`s Niall Ferguson puts it: `There is no credible move being made by the Obama administration to bring American public finances into balance even over a ten-year horizon.`

On the contrary, he says `a whole world of pain lies ahead.`

Ferguson posits a government manacled by spiraling debt costs, with the Federal Reserve printing trillions more to keep interest rates down. Ugly by any measure.

James Thurber is slightly more charitable: `He promised everyone was going to heaven without dying. That`s what transformational figures do.

`Turns out you can`t do it. You have to pay for it.`

In other words, crushing debt, rather than the realization of fond hopes, may be Obama`s legacy.