By Martin F. Nolan

San Francisco Chronicle

Jonathan Alter is the new Theodore H. White. Almost 50 years ago, White pioneered presidential politics as human drama with the reporter as playwright. A former Time magazine reporter, he brought prodigious shoe-leather reporting and an eye for marginally meaningful anecdotes to "The Making of the President 1960," one of the most imitated works of the 20th century.

A Newsweek writer, Alter has deployed White's skills to a new franchise: the first 12 months of an American presidency as nonfiction melodrama. "The Promise: President Obama, Year One" is not a campaign rehash, but a well-informed chronicle, sometimes louis vuitton bags sober, often raucous. Other books will be written about Barack Obama's time in the White House; this snapshot of 2009 will be a durable, well-thumbed guide.

The author is lucky in his subject. He is also lucky because his, and sometimes Obama's, matrix is Franklin D. Roosevelt's first year as president. Alter's 2006 book, "The Defining Moment," is a refreshing, readable account of 1933.

Diligence, not luck, explains his cultivation of talkative sources. One is candor's gift to journalism, Joe Biden, who early in 2009 shelved his healthy ego to proclaim, "We got the ticket in the right order."

After a tepid, unmemorable inaugural address, Obama confronted two wars and the collapse of a casinolike banking system. As in FDR's time, Alter writes, "Americans wanted to see their president enjoying the job and staying cheerful even as he told them the truth about the condition of the country. Calibrating the ratio of optimism to realism would be a daily challenge for Obama."

In Washington, staff squabbles fascinate those who miss television's "The West Wing." A chapter full of such tales, "Rahmbo," is, like most staff tales, ho-hum chatter. But I'd buy a ticket to the tiff the author describes between economic adviser Lawrence Summers, who tried to exclude from economy meetings the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer. She suggested sexism.

" 'Don't you threaten me!' Summers yelled.

'Don't you bully me!' Romer shouted."

She stayed in the meetings.

In "The Promise," Summers is no hero. "The greatest Fed chairman in history," Paul Volcker, is. Their boss presides over disputes serenely. "Like FDR and Reagan (who patterned his style on Roosevelt's), Obama's winning smile obscured a layer of self- protective ice, a useful combination in a chief executive," Alter writes, deciding that Obama is not as inscrutable as previous presidents.

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Alter's most distressing excursion into hagiography comes from a Cabinet secretary who says Obama and another Chicago icon, Michael Jordan, share "the same mental toughness and desire to win. ... At the end of the game, Barack always wants the ball," says the secretary of education, Arne Duncan, who majored in sociology at Harvard and sycophancy as well.

More credible and more revealing is Alter's note on a less flashy sport: "After ed hardy shirts being humiliated at a Pennsylvania bowling alley during the primaries, he worked hard on his game in the White House bowling alley that Nixon installed, plotting his public return to the lanes in 2012."

Like his subject, Alter seems confident, not arrogant.

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