This year, he mentioned gun violence only once, saying:

“Citizenship means standing up for the lives that gun violence steals from us each day.”

The only big proposal that even has a chance this year is comprehensive immigration reform, and its prospects are far from certain.

Last year, the president spoke extensively about passing immigration reform, repeating, “Now is the time to do it. Now is the time to get it done. Now is the time to get it done.” He spoke about stronger border security, a pathway to citizenship and decreasing waiting times for highly skilled immigrants.

This year, he spoke of immigration in a single passage, with no specifics other than to cite this: “Independent economists say immigration reform will grow our economy and shrink our deficits by almost $1 trillion in the next two decades.”

The president seems to have been reduced by the resistance. He seems to be concentrating on what can be done rather than on what should be done. This is a rational reaction, I suppose, to irrational opposition, but nonetheless it’s a sad indictment of our politics.

The president has had failures and missteps, to be sure. Every administration has some. None are perfect. But the idea of grinding government to a halt in opposition to one leader — as Republicans have done — has been an extraordinary and infuriating thing to behold.

And it has been sad to watch a president full of hope and promise be stymied at nearly every turn and have to reframe his objectives.

In an article this week in The New Yorker, Obama attempted to give context to his struggles and place his term in the long sweep of history:

“And I think America was very lucky that Abraham Lincoln was President when he was President. If he hadn’t been, the course of history would be very different. But I also think that, despite being the greatest President, in my mind, in our history, it took another hundred and fifty years before African-Americans had anything approaching formal equality, much less real equality. I think that doesn’t diminish Lincoln’s achievements, but it acknowledges that at the end of the day we’re part of a long-running story. We just try to get our paragraph right.”

The president who was fond of proclaiming that under his leadership, the country was beginning a “new chapter” on everything from diplomacy to climate change, is now just trying to get his paragraph right.