Barack Obama’s jobs speech last night was not the speech his critics from the left had been asking for. It didn’t call out the “malefactors of great wealth” or “the forces of selfishness and of lust for power.” It didn’t adopt the language of FDR’s 1936 speech in Madison Square Garden—that gripping outlier even among Roosevelt’s own rhetoric, much less the mainstream of presidential speeches—so frequently invoked as a model in recent months: “They are unanimous in their hatred for me, and I welcome their hatred.” Contrary to all recommendations from Paul Krugman, The American Prospect or DailyKos, this non-populist, not-very-partisan president again refused to don the cloak of partisanship or populism.

And they loved it anyway, the critics from the left, in tone as well as content. That’s because, at least for the moment, Obama solved a persistent, deadly problem in his basic theory of politics: There was no Plan B.

The original theory of Obama was supposed to be a kind of win-win. With a conciliatory, open tone, and by putting process—deliberation, collaboration, good faith—at the center of his politics, he could maneuver with or without Republican cooperation. Either he would capture enough Republican assent (he didn’t need much) to move some of his agenda, or he would be able to call out the Republicans for their obstructionism and claim the higher, less partisan ground. This wasn’t crazy—all evidence from the 2008 election suggested that both the enthusiasm of younger voters, and the hesitant shift of older independents and moderate Republicans to Obama, had everything to do with that promise to tone down and change the process of politics. That change, not a vehement progressive agenda, was what the voters who made his majority expected.

The problem was that it was all too easy for a disciplined Republican congressional faction to entirely deny Obama the option of enacting his agenda. The Republican discipline of the Bush era became useless after the 2004 Bush reelection, and the party seemed totally at sea in moments such as the 2008 Wall Street crisis—but that’s because it was always a machine designed for opposition, not governance. Obama gave it the oppositional purpose that the partisan machine had lacked, and the Tea Party just helped kick the engines into gear.

And the idea of “calling them out” on partisanship didn’t work, because it was about process, not any particular thing. Republicans may have been “obstructionist,” but that was just an abstraction—there wasn’t any real thing they were blocking, some knowable alternative that would have changed the economic conditions of Americans. Or, if there was an alternative, it was everything: Republicans were blocking health care reform, and cap and trade, and appropriations bills, and nominations, and labor protections and environmental regulations—everything, and yet nothing that people could put their hands around and appreciate that it could have made a difference.