Over the past year, the advisers who have made the transition to the White House  including Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, and David Axelrod, the senior adviser who heads communications strategy  have argued that what worked in the campaign works equally well for governing. So they dismissed, for example, the concerns that Mr. Obama was “dithering” over the decision to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. Or that he was insufficiently forceful in getting Congress to pass health care, on his terms, before the summer recess or before the Christmas break.

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.

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?