Still, given the power of pocketbook issues to hurt incumbents at election time, Mr. Mellman said Mr. Obama and Democratic officeholders are smart to address the issue. He predicted that other Democrats would increasingly “go after the oil companies” when they are reporting record profits, but he added, “The president does a bit less of that.”

Indeed, Mr. Obama devoted a chunk of his speech to boasting of newly approved drilling permits and countering charges from Republicans and oil industry executives that his administration had choked off domestic oil and gas production with costly new regulations and blocked exploration on millions of acres of potentially oil-rich tracts onshore and off.

Mr. Obama emphatically took ownership of some new safeguards for deepwater drilling intended to prevent repeating last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But he said that the administration had begun to reissue drilling permits where companies showed that they could safely resume operations. “So any claim that my administration is responsible for gas prices because we’ve shut down oil production — any claim like that is simply untrue,” Mr. Obama said.

The administration is not prepared to open additional public lands and waters to drilling, officials said, but will propose incentives and penalties to prod the industry to develop resources where they already have access.

The Interior Department on Tuesday reported that more than two-thirds of leases in the Gulf of Mexico and more than half of leases on federal lands were unused. Industry officials dismissed the report as a smokescreen for what they view as the administration’s stingy approach to drilling permits.

Alluding to the crisis in Japan, Mr. Obama said nuclear power must remain an important source of electricity in the United States because it does not add climate-altering carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. But, he said, “I’m determined to ensure that it’s safe.”

Most of Mr. Obama’s speech focused on his long-term strategy to save fuel by relying more on alternative and renewable energy sources. The one-third reduction in oil imports he has set as a target, which would be roughly three million to four million barrels a day at current levels of imports, corresponds roughly to the total the United States now gets from the Middle East and North Africa.