Mr. Obama’s adversaries on Monday were quick to point out that the president has frequently set out on similar campaign-style efforts to redefine or restate his economic agenda, often accompanied by rhetoric from his advisers about a new direction or emphasis. Congressional Republicans said they were incredulous that Mr. Obama planned to use another set of speeches instead of legislative negotiations to advance his economic agenda.

“It’s a cliché, but if all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio. “They don’t know how to do anything else.”

In the fall of 2011, Mr. Obama addressed a joint session of Congress to unveil a $447 billion jobs bill that has not passed. In 2012, as his re-election campaign neared its end, he renewed his vision with a 20-page economic plan. In his State of the Union address in February, the president refocused on the economy after beginning his second term focused on gun control, immigration, climate change and gay rights. And just this past May, Mr. Obama announced he was restarting his “Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tour,” with stops in Baltimore and Austin, Tex.

“They’ve been saying the same thing for four years,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader in the Senate. “The previous Democrat Congress passed his agenda — Obamacare, the stimulus, thousands of pages of regulations — and the economy is treading water. More taxes, more regulation, and more failures to unleash American energy jobs are not the answer.”

Administration officials on Monday conceded that the president was partly to blame for the debates in Washington veering away from the economic issues that many Americans believe are the most important. One official said that it was incumbent on Mr. Obama to shift the overall focus of the conversation in Washington, but acknowledged that has not happened.

The officials also criticized Republicans, especially in the House, for seizing on what the White House says are overblown scandals: the targeting of nonprofit groups at the Internal Revenue Service and the actions of officials after the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

They said that some of the distractions in Washington have been out of Mr. Obama’s control: the 2010 oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon well in the Gulf of Mexico; Hurricane Sandy’s destruction late last year and the tornadoes in Oklahoma City in May; tensions in the Middle East and even the Trayvon Martin verdict.