Four years ago I was seventeen. I had just learned to drive, Avatar hadn’t yet infected cinemas with 3D glasses and Nicki Minaj was a stranger to the charts. 2008 was a simpler time. It was also the year I watched with bated breath as Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.

Four years later I am awaiting the upcoming election with an altogether different attitude. The 2008 election was fascinating, with memorable characters like the venerable veteran John McCain and Democrat stalwart Hillary Clinton. There was even the unfortunate but exciting sideshow of Sarah Palin. I had told myself I would not fall for the electioneering of this elaborate, if sometimes vulgar, contest. But I was a bushy-eyed and bright-tailed history student and Barack Obama’s inspirational rhetoric proved impossible to resist. I believed his sweeping victory in November could genuinely be a momentous occasion for America – one of those rare events you recall in years to come.

Last week I found three copies of The Times from the 4th to the 6th of November stashed in my room. Imagine the naïve optimism that compelled my 17-year-old self to keep these particular editions. However, reading the faded pages today I can see the ways in which my outlook has changed: to my disappointment, I’ve become jaded.

Guantanamo Bay survives, the situation in Afghanistan is still deeply troubling and the Iranian crisis slowly worsens. Domestic issues are just as worrying: the struggling economy means unemployment levels are high while Republicans scramble to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act known to us as ‘Obamacare’.

Obama was probably always promising too much with his progressive attitude towards healthcare and ambitious ideas for a post-Bush foreign policy. He was handicapped right from his inauguration by the gravity of the financial crisis. The right man at the wrong time, perhaps.

To see Obama, once such a symbol of hope, hamstrung by political and financial realities has been distressing. "Change is going to take more than one term or one President or one party," he said at a recent fundraiser. When one remembers his damaging debate with Congressional Republicans about the debt ceiling, the ‘one party’ seems a particular sticking point.

Similarly, the platform of confidence and progress he so eloquently presented in ’08 has been replaced with petty negative television adverts about Mitt Romney. Obama’s performance in the first presidential debate last week lacked the energy of the eloquence he displayed in confrontations with John McCain.

But of course, this is the way politics works. Incumbent politicians must defend themselves against aggressive opposition. Disappointment at lost campaign promises is to be expected, which is why someone went to the effort of mocking Nick Clegg’s very belated apology by turning it autotune. Still, the manner in which Obama’s presidential term has coincided with the maturing of young people like myself makes this transformation especially poignant. It seems a shame such genuine passion can cool so quickly to cynicism.

Indeed, this may merely be an example of the celebrity-democracy crisis that comes when a leader is mythologised into a political saviour. It is no secret that the executive branch of the American government is often over-estimated in its ability to pass legislation, and the mid-term losses in Congress explain much about the difficulty Obama has had passing economic and social law. In many ways, Obama provided a dose of radical politics in a nation with a remarkable capacity for conservative stubbornness.

So don’t get me wrong, I will be rooting for Obama to win a second term: I would rather it was he who dealt with a potential escalation in Iran and I think it more prudent to continue with his economic strategy than hope free markets magically provide the answers. Perhaps most importantly of all, I hope he can safeguard his healthcare bill for posterity.

However, I wonder how many people around my age have gone through the same changes, leaving their support for Obama in 2012 feeling a whole lot different from how it did in 2008. I expect what we feel is not disenchantment with one man, but a natural rite of passage: maturing and losing faith in the political process. Perhaps it is inescapable. But I can only hope that at some point in my life I may feel the same sense of enthusiasm and optimism that I did for Barack Obama in 2008.