Presidents wake up every day wondering whether terrorists will attack Americans and whether they will be judged to have failed to protect the homeland if that happens.

Presidents make decisions.

Members of Congress make speeches.

Is that unfair? Perhaps a little. Presidents can hem and haw and speechify with the best of them, and lawmakers sometimes take courageous, politically unpopular stands and cast votes that could cost them their jobs come the next election.

But being president has to be, no contest, the loneliest job in the world -- just look at the way they age (see the before and after photos of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush as recent examples) during their time in the White House.

It must not have taken long for President Barack Obama to realize that candidate Obama, and certainly Sen. Obama, just may have viewed the world in overly simplistic terms.

Does Obama now embrace the Bush administration's decision to go after suspected terrorists?

Does Obama completely buy into all of the "enhanced interrogation techniques" employed after 9/11? Does Obama totally endorse how suspected terrorist detainees were treated and housed at Guantanamo Bay? Is he ready to march lock step forward with military tribunals as conceived by the Bush administration?

No, of course not.

But much to the chagrin of the liberal wing of his party, Obama clearly isn't ready to throw out Bush's playbook entirely, throw open everything done in secret or throw the book at Bush administration officials who, critics claim, crossed the line from interrogation to torture.

Just look at Obama's decision not to release post-interrogation photos of detainees. That has infuriated many of Obama's allies on the left, but Obama and his advisers don't want to take any chances on endangering U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and have no appetite for further inflaming the interrogation-torture debate.

Likewise, Obama has decided that simply dealing with suspected terrorists in the regular U.S. court system isn't realistic, that some sort of military tribunal system needs to be maintained.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to war with the CIA last week over how much she knew back in 2002 and 2003 about how detainees were being interrogated, and that was the last thing Obama wanted. He saw his agenda for the week -- health-care and credit-card reform -- hijacked, to the glee of Republicans trying desperately to regain a political foothold.

And as Obama tries to figure out how to keep Afghanistan from again becoming a haven for the Taliban and al-Qaida, not to mention the dangers next door in nuclear-armed Pakistan, he got no help from a large block in his own party. Fifty-one Democrats voted against $96 billion to continue military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and their rhetoric wasn't much different from when Bush was asking for that kind of money.

"Don't tell the American people that you are ending the war by continuing to fund the war," said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich of Cleveland, who along with fellow Ohio Rep. Marcy Kaptur, D-Toledo, voted no on the war-funding bill. "Don't tell the American people that the war will end when their plans leave 50,000 troops in Iraq. Don't tell the American people that the way out of Afghanistan is to escalate our presence. Get out of Iraq. Get out Afghanistan. Come home America."

That sounds good. But life isn't so simple, Obama must think when he hears that kind of talk.

Jonathan Riskind is chief of the Dispatch Washington bureau.

jriskind@dispatch.com