Editor's note: CNN's Ed Henry traveled with Barack Obama to Europe on the his first overseas trip as president.

President Obama speaks during a news conference after the G-20 summit in London, England, on April 2.

ISTANBUL, Turkey (CNN)  -- One of the most revealing moments of President Obama's European tour came early in the trip at the close of the G-20 summit in London, England, where expectations were sky high for the new guy.

He had just scored some victories on the financial crisis, while also taking some lumps. And now he had to face the media.

Pushed by a reporter on why he couldn't get more done, the president was ready with a comeback about how it was far easier for American and British leaders to get their way at summits in years gone by.

"Well, if there's just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that's a -- that's an easier negotiation," the president said to laughter from reporters. "But that's not the world we live in, and it shouldn't be the world that we live in."

In two simple sentences, the president accomplished a lot.

In the first sentence, he made a fair point about how no U.S. president -- Barack Obama or George W. Bush -- can simply wave a magic wand and get the world to follow his lead.

And in the second, with the line about how "it shouldn't be the world that we live in," he was trying to send a signal to Europe that he's not planning to bully them.

Again and again, Obama said he was here to listen and learn -- not to lecture colleagues such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Left unsaid, since it was plain enough to see, was what Obama was really saying: I'm not President Bush.

That was clearly Obama's biggest accomplishment on this trip. He was able to effectively press that reset button administration officials have been talking about in order to make the case that traditional U.S. allies should come back into the fold, and it seemed to work.

I remember sitting in the front row during a news conference at a palace in France to hear Sarkozy positively gush, "And it feels really good to be able to work with a U.S. president who wants to change the world and who understands that the world does not boil down to simply American frontiers and borders. And that is a hell of a good piece of news for 2009."

Those are the style points where Obama clearly scored, and not just with European leaders.

A new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll found that 79 percent of Americans surveyed feel that Obama has had a "more positive" effect on how people in other countries view the U.S. Only 19 percent of those surveyed thought he's had a "more negative" effect.

The much tougher question is on substance, and whether Obama was able to capitalize on those warm feelings to accomplish what he set out to do before this trip. On that he basically has an incomplete because the early record here in Europe has been mixed.

At the London summit, the president pushed for big money to be pumped into the world economy, and the leaders responded with $1.1 trillion. But that money is being directed to the International Monetary Fund to help developing countries, not pumped into the large economies to stimulate growth as U.S. officials had hoped.

And Obama was also able to help prevent Sarkozy and others from getting a global supercop to oversee markets across all borders, a bit of a victory in his effort to make sure new regulations do not go too far.

Perhaps the biggest victory came on the sidelines of the G-20 and had nothing to do with the financial crisis.

Obama had his first face-to-face with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, and they seemed to thaw those recently icy relations. Most important, is the two men agreed to begin intense negotiations to drastically reduce each side's nuclear stockpiles. This could be a dramatic step forward for world
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French U.S. president Barack Obama Roosevelt and Churchill
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