WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama won the first big test of his presidency late Friday night, but the way he won suggests that he faces challenges going forward as he fights to solve the nation’s banking crisis, expand health care and achieve the rest of his agenda.

His path to victory on the $787 billion plan to stimulate the economy raises questions about how much clout the Obama White House has in Congress and how the new president uses it.

Obama won approval of the stimulus plan with no margin for error, getting the minimum 60 votes he needed in the Senate despite his popularity and the sense of urgency that opened the doors for quick action by a slow-moving legislative branch.

The slender margin, punctuated by tensions up to the last minute between the liberal Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives and the three moderate Republicans who hold the key to the Senate, mean that Obama likely will be tested repeatedly as he seeks approval for proposals such as bank rescues and health care, which could be even more difficult to sell.

His emerging leadership style suggests that Obama is taking a middle ground — somewhere between Ronald Reagan, who set broad goals and left the details to his aides and Congress, and Bill Clinton, who immersed himself in details and dealmaking, sometimes to great effect and sometimes to great failure.

"He's in the middle between the two of them," said Bruce Buchanan, a political scientist and a scholar of the presidency at the University of Texas at Austin. "He isn't in one camp or the other."

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a former congressman from Illinois, said Thursday in an interview with a small group of reporters that Obama set his strategy back on Dec. 12. While conceding that the White House learned some lessons along the way, Emanuel said that Obama's blend of broad goals first and a detailed, hands-on role in the final days paid off.

"This is close to 90 percent of what we were thinking about," Emanuel said.

From the start, Obama signaled that he'd draw the broad brushstrokes of what he wanted to create jobs — spending on roads and bridges, schools and energy conservation, computerized health records, tax cuts for business that create new jobs and for people to reduce the payroll tax.

Yet by leaving it to House Democrats to write the first proposal, Obama ceded power over the process to them. That caused Obama to lose the initial public relations battle, as Republicans bore in on Democratic proposals such as money for family planning and sod for Washington's National Mall.

Emanuel conceded that the White House lost four days of the clash, but said it was because Obama focused too much on bipartisanship at the expense of talking up the benefits of the still-emerging proposal.

Still, members of Congress grumbled that Obama wasn't involved enough. Why, lawmakers said, didn't he send his own bill up to Congress and let members work from that? Why didn't he get involved in the bargaining?

Members also complained that Obama wasn't tough enough when he did engage members, particularly in his Jan. 27 meetings with Republicans. He and the GOP leaders emerged from those sessions praising one another, but Republicans quickly complained that Obama didn't press congressional Democrats to compromise.

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