News Analysis: Obama Second Term Has Immediate Challenges

Doug Mills/The New York Times

This time around, grand visions for the president have been replaced by the prospect of long negotiations on spending and taxes.

For President Obama, now comes a second chance. An electorate that considers the country to be on the wrong track nonetheless agreed to renew his contract on Tuesday in hopes that the next four years will be better than the last.

Mr. Obama emerges from a scalding campaign and a four-year education in the realities of Washington a far different figure from the man sent to the White House in 2008. What faces him in this next stage of his journey are not overinflated expectations of partisan, racial and global healing, but granular negotiations over spending cuts and tax increases plus a looming showdown with Iran.

Few if any expect him to seriously change Washington anymore; most voters just seemed to want him to make it function. His remarkable personal story and trailblazing role are just a vague backdrop at this point to a campaign that often seemed to lack a singular, overriding mission beyond stopping his challenger from taking the country in another direction.

More seasoned and scarred, less prone to grandiosity and perhaps even less idealistic, Mr. Obama returns for a second term with a Congress still at least partly controlled by an opposition party that will claim a mandate of its own. He will have to choose between conciliation and confrontation, or find a way to toggle back and forth between the two.

"Will he be more pugnacious and more willing to swing for the fences on domestic issues, judicial appointments and so forth?" asked Christopher Edley Jr., a dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime Obama friend who has been disappointed at times. "You can react to a narrow victory by trimming your sails, or you can decide 'What the hell, let's sail into the storm and make sure this has meant something.' "

The champagne bottles from victory celebrations in Chicago will barely be emptied before Mr. Obama has to begin answering that question. The coming end-of-the-year fiscal cliff prompted by trillions of dollars of automatic tax increases and spending cuts could force Mr. Obama to define priorities that will shape the rest of his presidency before he even puts his hand on the Bible to take the oath a second time.

Mr. Obama has expressed hope that "the fever may break" after the election and that the parties come together, a theory encouraged by allies like Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts. "I've talked with colleagues in the Senate who for months have told me they're very anxious to get beyond the gridlock and craziness," Mr. Kerry said.

If that proves overly optimistic, allies said, then the president's re-election puts him in a stronger position than in the past. "I actually think he's holding a lot of cards coming off a win," said John D. Podesta, who led Mr. Obama's transition team four years ago. "He can't be overturned by veto, so he can create a certain set of demands on Republicans that they're going to have to deal with."

But even as votes were coming in, Republicans were making clear that Mr. Obama will have to deal with them, too.

"If he wins, he wins — but at the same time, voters will clearly vote for a Republican House," said Representative Joe Wilson, a South Carolina Republican who shouted "You lie!" at Mr. Obama during a speech to Congress. "The consequence of that is our voters really anticipate and count on us holding firm."

It may have been inevitable that Mr. Obama could not live up to the heavy mantle of hope and change he assumed in 2008 as the first African-American to be elected president. Inheriting an economy in crisis, he pushed through a sweeping stimulus package, the health care law and Wall Street regulatory measures, and he headed off another depression. But he failed to change the culture of Washington or bring unemployment down to healthy levels.

By 2010, amid a Tea Party revolt over rising national debt and expanding government, his party lost the House. He spent the last two years trying to hang onto the White House lest he turn into what he once feared becoming, a "comet streaking across the sky" that would "eventually burn up."

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