Washington ? The president sits at ease in a blue suit, blue shirt and blue patterned tie. Over one shoulder is a bronze bust of Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader who was slain when the president was 6 years old. Over the other shoulder is a bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln by the Gilded Age sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whom Obama no doubt knows as the artist behind the Shaw Memorial, the unforgettable tribute to the black infantry unit that fought for the Union in the Civil War.

This is Obama’s moment, and it is Obama’s White House.

He is settling in, growing comfortable with his office and in his office. He installed the great George Peter Alexander Healy painting “The Peacemakers” in his private study. It is a beloved image of Lincoln with military leaders a few weeks before the end of the Civil War. The telling detail: the rainbow in the cabin window of the steamer River Queen as it sits on the James River.

Lincoln comparison

The president sees few rainbows outside his office these days; the storm clouds seem to linger, representing the economy, health care, Afghanistan, Iran. But overall his passage is far less perilous than that of Lincoln after only eight months. At this point in his presidency, Lincoln was suspending writs of habeas corpus and meeting repeatedly (and unsatisfactorily) with Gen. George McClellan. It would take a very long time for things to go better for Lincoln.

“Look, I’m not having to go through what Lincoln went through,” the president says. “The country right now is going through a tough time; it’s anxious. I think people are worried about the future, their retirement, their ability to finance their kids’ college educations. But we remain the wealthiest nation on Earth, the most powerful nation on Earth, the most influential nation on Earth.

“There is a broad consensus about how we need to improve our education system; we need to free ourselves from dependence on foreign oil; we’ve got to fix our health care system. We’re having some arguments about the details, but it’s nothing compared to what somebody like Lincoln or Washington was going through, where the country itself was at risk.”

Presidential perspective

That is good perspective, both for us and for the president. He has a hard job, but not as hard as some other presidents. He has challenges, but not as great as some who came before him. He has critics, but not as harsh (so far) as some of his predecessors, including his last two.

The president seems at ease, both with his predicament and with his promise. Outside the White House the furies howl, some of them his former friends, sensing betrayal, and some of them his newly emboldened partisan rivals, sensing that they may not be in as deep a wilderness as they worried only a few months ago. It is difficult, amid all the noise, to listen to the people whom Richard Nixon called the silent majority, a phrase that came out twisted in his rendering but that somehow still endures as a potent force, even in this new age of amplitude.

The White House has a strong if not strange effect on presidents. It isolates them from the present even as it marinates them in the past.

Historical view

The historical-minded among them, especially Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy, are drawn even deeper into their reveries while the casual observers of the presidency, including Lyndon B. Johnson and George W. Bush, find solace in the stories of the men who preceded them and who shared a burden that almost inevitably is described as indescribable.

So it was telling the other morning when Obama began a sentence this way: “You know, I — as a student of presidential history …”

He knows that that history includes but 43 other people (Grover Cleveland counts twice, having served non-consecutive terms, which is why the number 44 is so often attached to Obama.) and that he is forever a part of the presidential story, no matter how his own story turns out.

But it is worth picking up where Obama left off after describing himself as a presidential scholar: “I’ve always believed that even presidents who were considered failures oftentimes were just dealing with issues at a time when the country was going through some tough times and that the power of this office to shape the course of history is sometimes limited.”

That is a lesson Kennedy learned from the presidential scholar Richard Neustadt — and from his own hard experience. Indeed, Kennedy’s predecessor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as Allied commander at D-Day was used to having his orders fulfilled, would have a lot to tell Obama about the limitations of the presidency.

Complicated country

Now back to Obama’s musings: “(T)he way I approach the job is that given the options in front of me, I try to create a decision-making process where I’m making the best possible decision, given the information that I have and the circumstances that present themselves.

“But sometimes there aren’t good options,” he goes on. “And I think that there are a lot of presidents who have found themselves making the best decisions they could, and it didn’t work out so well. And that happens because this is a big, complicated country with a lot of moving parts.”

In other words, you can’t imagine how complex this job is — a notion that some of Obama’s onetime supporters are reluctant to accept, a thought that some of them weren’t eager to acknowledge in the Bush years.

“Well, I think that once you’ve sat in this office for a while you have sympathy for all presidents,” he says, and here the president laughs, before adding, “because there are a lot of issues that come before you and, as I tell people, if they were easy they don’t get to my desk. Somebody else has solved them. The only things that arrive at my desk are the ones that are really hard.”

He says that now. You want to whisper in his ear: Mr. President, the hardest ones haven’t arrived yet.