That same attitude permeated last night’s State of the Union address. It dripped from his warning to his own party that “we still have the largest majority in decades, and the people expect us to solve some problems, not run for the hills.” It was the central theme of his message on health care, where he argued that the problem was not the initiative itself, but his own failures in communicating its virtues.

“As temperatures cool,” he said, making an assumption that they would cool, “I want everyone to take another look at the plan we’ve proposed.” He repeated his challenge that if anyone else in the political spectrum had a better way to bring down premiums and cover the uninsured, “let me know.” This was not a Clintonian effort to triangulate. It was rooted in Mr. Obama’s certainty that over time, pragmatism would overcome politics.

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But as the midterm elections approach, there is little reason to expect that that the partisan divide will narrow. So the gamble underlying Mr. Obama’s speech seems to be that he can muddle through the November elections with perhaps 20 or 30 lost seats in the House, and a handful in the Senate, and avoid the kind of rout that led Mr. Clinton to declare the end of the big government era. (Of course, it did not end — under Mr. Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, the size of the federal government mushroomed, as did the deficit, a point Mr. Obama alluded to several times.)

To Mr. Obama’s rivals on the right, the president’s unwillingness to move at all from his agenda creates his vulnerability. “Perhaps the most striking aspect of last night’s speech,” wrote Peter Wehner, a former political strategist for President Bush and an aide to Karl Rove wrote in Politics Daily, “was that Obama spoke as if the last year hadn’t happened; as if he had not been president; and as if Congress had not been controlled by Democrats. He sought to portray himself as an outsider and reformer, an antidote to cynicism, and a postpartisan, unifying force.” In fact, that is exactly what he attempted, much as he did in the campaign. So what has changed?

Perhaps the biggest change is that in the past few months, Mr. Obama has seen the passion of his own political base wither. His Afghanistan decision was deeply unpopular with the most activist of his 2008 supporters — the Democratic left, the students and twentysomethings. While the White House argues that Democrats are over-reading the results of the special election in Massachusetts — Mr. Emanuel argues the election would have been won if Democrats and the White House had paid sufficient attention — clearly Mr. Obama lost touch with the independents who voted for him a year ago. They made the difference for the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, in the Senate race.

So Mr. Obama’s biggest challenge in the next few weeks may be overcoming the fears, and perhaps the inertia, of his own party. Yet the speech conveyed little of the sense of urgency he brought to the same chamber when he gave his first address to a joint session of Congress a year ago. At that time, he laid out a legislative agenda for the year. This time, he offered no timeline, no deadline, for resolving the health care debate. Nor did he on financial reform. When he talked about energy and climate change, he made no direct mention of the most controversial element of his plan — the cap-and-trade system that would, for the first time, create a price for emitting carbon into the atmosphere. Instead, he spoke of “incentives.”

In short, his message was that his agenda remains unchanged; only the timing is uncertain. That is the difference between the Clinton approach in 1996 and the Obama approach in 2010. Mr. Clinton clearly felt that he needed to get ahead of the political passions of the moment. Mr. Obama, rightly or wrongly, still is acting like he can control them.