Obama was to meet Wednesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and other Democratic leaders to discuss the massive legislation. Negotiators from the White House and the two chambers have begun closed-door meetings already and seem likely to abandon a House-approved surtax on the wealthy even as they consider extending the Medicare payroll tax to investment income of high earners, Democratic officials said.

“I have so much faith in the president of the United States and his ability to be persuasive,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., said Tuesday.

But the politically charged clamor has lumped together disparate cases and obscured the fact that the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill. The weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives — in several cases, duds supplied by F.B.I. informants — with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear.

And though 2009 brought more domestic plots, and more serious plots, than any recent year, their lethality was relatively modest. Exactly 14 of the approximately 14,000 murders in the United States last year resulted from allegedly jihadist attacks: 13 people shot at Fort Hood in Texas in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark., in June.

The devastation was so complete that it seemed likely the death toll from Tuesday afternoon’s magnitude-7.0 quake would run into the thousands. France’s foreign minister said the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission was apparently among the dead.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said an estimated 3 million people may have been affected by the quake and that it would take a day or two for a clear picture of the damage to emerge