Inside a shaken White House.

Of all the historical analogies urged on Obama following November’s drubbing—Truman in ’48, Reagan after ’82, Clinton after ’94—the one the White House has opted for is easily the most obscure. That would be Patrick in ’10—as in Deval Patrick, the recently re-elected governor of Massachusetts. Months after Patrick signed the state’s first sales-tax hike in 33 years, political chatterers gave him little chance of surviving to a second term. Not only did he face the same foul, anti-incumbent mood that elected Scott Brown, he’d drawn an attractive GOP candidate in businessman Charlie Baker.

Patrick’s handlers recommended that he distance himself from liberals in the state legislature—and, above all, downplay the tax increase. The governor overruled them. His first commercial highlighted the “combination of deep cuts and new revenue” he’d accepted to close the state’s budget shortfall. “He all but said, ‘I raised taxes.’ Jesus Christ,” recalls one still-traumatized adviser. “He thought the way to do it was to be true to what he ran on [in 2006]”—the belief that voters will support someone who levels with them, even if they don’t love every decision. In the end, Patrick and his “politics of conviction” won by a comfortable seven-point margin.

It’s not hard to see the appeal of this narrative in Obamaland, whose principal also fancies himself a teller of hard truths. The way the president’s inner circle sees it, the re-election of Patrick—a longtime Obama pal and former client of his message guru David Axelrod and campaign manager David Plouffe—affirms the president’s bias against desperate reinventions. “[Patrick] may be a model for Obama in 2012,” says one strategist close to the White House. “Let them write you off for dead, say how stupid you are”—while you remind voters why they fell for you in the first place. So far, at least, the pundits are living up to their end of the bargain. The question is whether the president can live up to his.

By any measure, the first few weeks after the midterms were hardly encouraging. The president gave a low-energy press conference, then jetted off to Asia for ten days; the advisers he left behind seemed rootless and out of sorts. Still, as November wore on, the White House settled on the contours of a plan: Obama would refocus on reforming government and transcending partisanship—something they felt voters craved. “It was back to the first principles he stood by in the campaign,” says the strategist. This was, among other things, the impetus behind embracing a ban on congressional earmarks and freezing federal pay.

Both initiatives raised hackles among congressional Democrats and liberals, and stirred suspicions that Obama was bent on Dick Morris–style triangulation. But the charge is unfair. Obama has a longstanding appetite for good-government initiatives, dating back to his work on ethics and welfare reform in the Illinois state Senate. As a U.S. senator, he teamed up with Oklahoma conservative Tom Coburn to create an online database for earmarks. “It’s not left-right, it’s inside-outside,” says one administration official. In 2008, Obama was the vehicle for a backlash against Washington dysfunction. In 2010, the Tea Party was. The challenge Obama has set for himself is to reclaim that role.