This is a promise I’m glad he ended up breaking, of course, but it’s a broken promise nevertheless. And it’s just the latest in a seemingly endless series.

Apparently talking about closing the detention center during a campaign is easier than actually closing it. As they say, governing is hard to do.

President Obama acknowledged for the first time on Wednesday that his administration would miss a self-imposed deadline to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, by mid-January, admitting the difficulties of following through on one of his first pledges as president.

“Guantánamo, we had a specific deadline that was missed,” Mr. Obama said in an interview with NBC News in Beijing during his weeklong trip to Asia. Mr. Obama said that he now hoped to shut down the detention facility sometime next year, but he did not set a new deadline.

“We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantánamo will be closed next year,” Mr. Obama said in a separate interview with Fox News. “I’m not going to set an exact date because a lot of this is also going to depend on cooperation from Congress.”

The prospects for fully shutting down Guantánamo have been dimming for months as the administration stumbled over a litany of political and logistical tripwires. Gregory B. Craig, the White House counsel who drafted the order to close the facility, announced last week that he was stepping down. During the presidential campaign last year, Mr. Obama railed against the detention complex on an American military base in Cuba, calling it a symbol used by terrorists to recruit new members. Within days of his inauguration, he ordered Guantánamo closed by January.

He didn’t just rail against the detention center. He used its continued existence to bash John McCain and George Bush over the head as evil men holding terror suspects indefinitely on a military base in Cuba. It was a major centerpiece of his foreign and national security policy.

In the end, Obama discovered that few are interested in taking in murderous jihadists currently safely detained in a U.S. military detention facility. In other words, the college kid theorist got mugged by reality.