WASHINGTON (AP) — From the inaugural platform, President Joe Biden saw American sickness on two fronts — a disease of the national spirit and the one from the rampaging coronavirus — and he saw hope, because leaders always must see that.

For Biden, it’s been a year of lofty ambitions grounded by the unrelenting pandemic, a tough hand in Congress, a harrowing end to an overseas war and rising fears for the future of democracy itself.

Biden did score a public-works achievement for the ages.

In this midterm election year, Biden confronts seething divisions and a Republican Party that propagates the delusion that the 2020 election — exhaustively vetted, validated many times over, fair by all measures — was stolen from Donald Trump.

In the dispiriting close of Biden’s first year, roadblocks stood in the way of all big things pending.

Biden’s historic initiative to shore up the social safety net wallowed in Congress.

Only two days after Biden’s lacerating speech in Atlanta invoking the darkest days of segregation, he saw his voting rights legislation run aground when Democratic Sen.

For all of that, Barack Obama was on to something when he paid his old vice president an odd compliment late in the 2020 campaign.

Elect Joe Biden, he said, and after four years of flamboyant Trump dramas and crazy tweets, folks could feel safe ignoring their president and vice president for a spell.

Indeed America saw normalcy, some say dignity, return to the White House.

First lady Jill Biden’s studded “Love” jacket at a global summit not-so-subtly countered the “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket her predecessor wore on her flight to a migrant child detention center.

Instead of promising the world and delivering a Potemkin village (as when Trump declared the virus “very much under control” in February 2020), the Biden White House set pandemic and other goals that were modest to a fault, then exceeded them.

Even so, the discipline, drive and baseline competence from the new White House produced notable results.

“I think it’s a lot of achievements, a lot of accomplishment, in the face of some very serious obstacles,” Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, told The Associated Press on the cusp of Biden’s second year in office.

Matthew Delmont, a civil rights historian at Dartmouth, expected more from Biden by virtue of Biden’s decades of experience as a savvy operator in the capital.

“There’s something to be said for the professionalism of the White House and not going from one fire to the next,” Delmont said.

Political science professor Cal Jillson at Southern Methodist University in Dallas said Biden has displayed “warning track power” — the ability in baseball to hit long but not, as yet, over the fence.

“While there are vast partisan differences in how Biden is seen, in general he is seen as stable but not forceful,” he said.

In large measure, Biden’s innate civility and predictability brought the sort of climate change that the world could get behind.

No more doting looks at Russian President Vladimir Putin; instead, Biden stepped up diplomatic confrontation over Putin’s designs on Ukraine.

Discounting warnings from military and diplomatic advisers, Biden misjudged the Taliban’s tenacity and the staying power of Afghan security forces that had seen crucial U.S.

Absent an effective defense of those rights by Biden, “I can’t say that he’s doing enough to repay the Black Americans who put him in the White House.”.

Meantime, day after day, event after event, it was the virus that commanded Biden’s attention.

His mask-less springtime stroll with Vice President Kamala Harris in the Rose Garden may be remembered as an ill-conceived example to the country.

Overlaying everything, domestic or foreign, is a constant foreboding in the White House over what Trump might do next

A year ago Trump left Washington for Florida, breaking one last tradition as president by refusing to attend Biden’s inauguration