Republicans in the House and Senate are standing firmly in the way of Mr. Obama’s second-term agenda, with a message that is striking when set against the results of an election just four months ago: Mr. President, you have to come to us.

Representative Lynn Jenkins of Kansas, a member of the House Republican leadership, emerged from a closed-door meeting with Mr. Obama last week and declared, “I’m encouraged to have heard from the president today, but more encouraged that perhaps this is an indication he is willing to change course.”

Which raises the question: What are elections for?

“Continuing to double down on policies that have been firmly rejected by the American people flies in the face of everything the Republican Party said they would do in the aftermath of losing the popular vote for the fifth time in the last six elections,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama.

Of course, Republican lawmakers interpret the last election differently. “I think they are claiming too much of a mandate,” said Senator John Hoeven, Republican of North Dakota. “Number one, it was a close presidential election. Number two, the Republicans won the House, and they can lay claim to the same mandate. So to me, that’s a wash.”

Mr. Boehner said firmly that he did not believe that the ideals and programs pressed by Republicans in the past two years had much to do with the party’s electoral showing.

Rather than change course, “we have to do a better job communicating our principles to hard-working taxpayers,” he said in the interview last week. “I don’t think we did a very good job of that in the 2012 election.”

After President Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in 1964, House Republicans ousted their leader, brought in a new generation and proposed a host of what they called “constructive alternatives.” In 1981, after Ronald Reagan stormed to power, Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., a Democrat, lay low in the term’s opening months, watching an alliance of Republicans and Southern Democrats enact much of the new president’s sweeping agenda. The Republican losses in the midterm election of 1998 shocked the party and cost Newt Gingrich his speakership.