On Iran, gay marriage and the economy, the president is taking flak. But critics ignore the profound changes he is delivering

It’s a handy rule of thumb in Washington: a president’s fortunes can be divined by the way the White House press corps treats him. Think of George W Bush. At the height of his powers in 2003, reporters jockeyed for his favour, which he expressed by bestowing nicknames and sharing wisecracks. By the time Iraq and Katrina had ruined his presidency, the same hacks competed to see who could most effectively humiliate the president before a live audience.

So it was an ominous sign for Barack Obama last week when he appeared in the White House for a press conference that was his most uncomfortable to date. Reporters who had thus far treated him with deference and even admiration treated him with something close to disrespect. Obama, as the New York Times put it, “has rarely experienced as combative and contentious an hour on live television as he did on Tuesday afternoon”. Had his response to Iran, one asked, been “timid and weak”? Another tweaked the president’s “Spock-like language” about healthcare reform. One even grilled an increasingly irritated president about his furtive smoking habits. The treatment left Obama a bit testy. “I got it,” he groused. “You’re pitching, I’m catching.”

Indeed he has been catching – catching flak, that is, from critics on left and right and over both his foreign and domestic agendas. As he approaches the six-month mark of his presidency, his job has become less glamorous and more gruelling. Allies in Congress are restive and for the first time, the whiff of failures and defeats is in the air. Thus the new tone from the White House press corps, which, like animals in the wild, preys on the weak. But don’t be fooled by this dark patch. Obama’s long-term prospects remain bright.

Start on the domestic front. Here, Obama faces two titanic challenges. The first is the economy. An unexpected spike in jobless claims announced last week doused hopes that the economic downturn had finally reached an inflection point. With unemployment now approaching 10%, higher than the administration had predicted, Republicans are rallying around the argument that Obama’s $787bn stimulus bill passed in February isn’t working and amounts to a massive, deficit-swelling waste. “With all the spending that’s gone on, where are the new jobs?” asked House Republican leader John Boehner. Lately, some of Boehner’s colleagues are even fantasising about riding such talk to retake the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections. (The Senate is a steeper climb for Republicans.)

It’s true that if the economy fails to recover within the next year, no amount of hope and change can save Obama’s presidency. But those 2010 elections, the first real referendum on his performance, are still 16 months away. That leaves plenty of time for the economy to pick up steam. Moreover, polls show that most Americans still blame the economic doldrums on Bush. And while stimulus dollars have been frustratingly slow to be distributed, that will soon change, with the stimulative effect likely to kick in well before the midterms, dashing the hopes of many a Republican candidate.

Obama’s second domestic trial will be healthcare. Anyone who recalls Bill and Hillary Clinton’s attempt to cover America’s 40-plus million uninsured citizens in 1994 understands that, if mishandled, the issue can cripple a presidency. Congress is beginning to craft a healthcare plan with Obama’s guidance and the early going hasn’t been pretty. Proposals have carried eye-popping price tags ($1.6 trillion, according to one preliminary estimate by a Senate finance committee), while covering a disappointingly small number of Americans. Nor have the Democrats quite settled on how they will pay for a massive expansion of care. Last week, a prominent House Democrat pronounced that “healthcare reform is on life support”.

Don’t be surprised if Obama resuscitates it. Although many Democrats are nervous about his plan’s cost, it remains quite popular with the voters to whom those Democrats answer. Moreover, Republicans and business lobbies have been slow to organise against Obama’s plan or present credible options, something GOP strategists call crucial to victory. As for the money, it can always be found (deficits can be tackled another day) and the plan’s ambitions can be reduced if necessary. As White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has said about healthcare: “The only thing non-negotiable is success.” And the current Democratic majorities in Congress are large enough that Emanuel will not have to eat his words.

Obama is tiptoeing around other domestic land mines. The only thing that makes his congressional Democratic allies more nervous than supporting sweeping and expensive healthcare reform is the grand climate-change plan, passed by the House on Friday. However urgent it may be to fight global warming, public support for environmentalism drops dramatically in times of economic distress. But look for Obama to settle for a modest plan – a symbolic victory – rather than accept a stark political defeat. He can return to climate if need be. That may upset liberals, who are already fuming at him for not doing more to support gay marriage or the prosecution of people who authorised torture in the Bush era. But when push comes to shove, will such critics abandon Obama? Not likely.

Foreign policy is harder to predict and Obama is still learning on the job. Take the recent uprising in Iran. Obama first said little to encourage the protesters, then strongly condemned the regime. It was undeniably an uncertain response, hence the “timid and weak” charge. On the bright side, the world has witnessed the brutal face of the regime, which should make it easier for Obama to win tough international sanctions in the (likely) case that planned diplomatic attempts to talk Iran out of a nuclear bomb go nowhere.

Then there are Afghanistan and Pakistan. Thus far, Obama has been in crisis-management mode, trying to keep the government in Islamabad from falling apart and firing his top general in Afghanistan for poor management of the war effort there. But conditions may soon improve in both countries; the Pakistani military is finally cracking down on Islamic radicals. Meanwhile, Obama has ordered 21,000 more American troops to Afghanistan. But many analysts think that, much like the Iraq surge, the fight against the Taliban is eminently winnable if there are enough troops and the right counterinsurgency strategy is adopted.

So imagine, then a possible world of June 1 2010. The economy has rebounded and Obama, citing his stimulus package, is claiming the credit. A major (if not perfect) healthcare reform bill has passed, handing Obama a historical policy achievement in his first year. Iran is being squeezed hard by a disgusted international community, led forcefully by Obama, perhaps prompting a new reformist uprising against the clerics. The Taliban are at last on the run in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And, oh, by the way, the US is substantially pulling out of Iraq.

It will take luck – and more than a little political skill – for Obama to achieve such stellar results. But he’s never wanted for either. It will also take something else, however: the firm support of his fellow Democrats. There are signs that some in Obama’s party have studied the polls and the economic figures and may be wondering whether their self-interest may soon diverge from that of the president. But in fact, the Democrats’ fate is inextricably tied to Obama’s success.

Without him, the party is not particularly popular. These nervous Democrats should remember that moving an agenda as big as Obama’s was never going to be easy. But that even in difficult moments like these, his popularity remains durable and his prospects for success are better than they may appear. Perhaps Obama should propose a new motto for his party: Together we stand, divided we fall.

• Michael Crowley is a senior editor of the New Republic Magazine