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Barack Obama on stage in Grant Park, Chicago, on 4 November 2008. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Keith Richburg: On one year

Time is needed to clear the mess he inherited

Before he was elected president, Barack Obama, in The Audacity of Hope described himself as "a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. "I am bound to disappoint some, if not all of them," he added.

Now just over nine months into office – with his struggle to get a health care bill, the regular nightly savaging by conservative talk show hosts, and escalating attacks from emboldened Republicans – Obama's prediction seems prophetic.

He came to office riding the impossibly high hope that he was a transcendent political figure, the rare leader who could overcome this country's deep divisions of race, party and ideology, to be a unifier and a healer after the divisive presidency of George W Bush. Now we are again back to our ideological trenches.

His critics on the far right – who never really bought into "Obamamania" but felt silenced by his popularity – are increasingly strident in their attacks. And his supporters on the far left, once breathlessly trading YouTube links of every Obama campaign speech, find themselves disillusioned that he was not the populist champion who would immediately bring American troops home and create universal health care.

"I'm a little perplexed," a 42-year-old songwriter named Karen Davis, an early Obama supporter, told me in Jersey City. "I knew he was a centrist. I knew he wouldn't try to ram through a bunch of populist, progressive ideas." But, she added: "This isn't what I voted for… I haven't passed over into disappointed. I'm a little frustrated."

The decline has been tracked in polling by the Washington Post and others. In January, two days before he took office, a Post poll found that 79% of Americans had a favourable view of Obama, and 71% said the election gave Obama a mandate for major social and economic change. The most recent Post poll, on 18 October, found his approval rating had dropped to 57%. Other polls put this lower; Gallup and NBC News at 51%, CNN at 55%. The Real Clear Politics "poll of polls" average puts Obama's approval rating at 51.6%.

What all the polls broadly agree on is this; Obama's drop in popularity from the heights of January can be attributed to the Republicans and professed independents moving away. Democrats still largely support the president, even if some on the left are growing frustrated. Republicans and independents – particularly those who describe themselves as "conservative" – have given up. So what happened?

The debate over the $787bn stimulus package and the bailout of the motor industry stoked fears that Obama was spending too much. Projections of soaring deficits have spooked fiscal conservatives. The August shouting match over health reform – with cries of "death panels" pulling the plug on ageing grannies and Republicans decrying a government "takeover" of health care – took its toll.

My view is that nine months is way too early to assess this presidency. Guantánamo Bay will be closed – just not yet. Troops will come home from Iraq, but not yet. Some form of a health care bill will pass, but its effects won't be felt for years. The economy should recover, and add jobs, in time.

Obama seems never likely to live up to the lofty expectations of his most ardent – and impatient – supporters, or to be as awful as some of his most strident critics say. Time is needed to clean up the mess he inherited. Yet no one these days is of a mind to wait and see. To use the phrase he repeated on the campaign trail, we live with "the fierce urgency of now".

Keith Richburg is New York bureau chief of the Washington Post