The competitiveness theme, which will be prominent in the State of the Union address, is a convenient rubric that encompasses trade as well as other presidential priorities like more education-accountability reforms, more federal support for research and innovation, more green technology industry like the advanced battery plants Obama likes to visit and more infrastructure like high-speed trains. Obama has tried before to link these disparate priorities into a coherent theme, calling such ideas, along with health care and financial regulation, the pillars of a New Foundation for a postcrisis economy, à la the New Deal. But he never made it stick. “Messaging when we have 9.8 percent unemployment is difficult,” Axelrod said. Now Obama is reframing these ideas as a response to China and other economic rivals that, he tells audiences, are moving forward while America risks lagging behind. In that way, he has turned his message into a made-in-America appeal to patriotism, and potentially grounds for consensus with Republicans. “This is a theme people can rally around,” Goolsbee told me. “We’ve shifted out of the rescue mode. We’ve got to move into full-fledged growth mode.”

Goolsbee will be operating in that mode as part of the new team. He replaced Romer as head of the Council of Economic Advisers, just as Sperling replaced Summers as head of the National Economic Council, Jack Lew replaced Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget and Daley replaced Emanuel as chief of staff. The selection of Sperling, who held the same job under Clinton, was telling. A onetime boy wonder who, despite his graying hair, still has the same whirling-dervish, work-till-midnight energy, Sperling was passed over for other prominent jobs. He bided his time as a counselor to Geithner, and eventually won over Obama with his doggedness. As a champion of the payroll tax holiday, he proved critical to shaping Obama’s tax deal with Republicans and so many other issues that White House officials refer to him as B.O.G., the Bureau of Gene. Where Summers was a master macroeconomic thinker, Sperling is known for his mastery of getting things done, or at least waging the fight, in the place where policy, politics and media meet. Lew is also returning to the same job he had under Clinton, when he balanced the budget alongside Congressional Republicans.

The renewed focus on the economy goes back to last August, when after months of grappling with health care, the oil spill and the financial-regulation bill, Obama resolved to redouble efforts to create jobs. While he was on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Obama called his economic advisers and told them to develop a new agenda for the fall, which led to a September proposal to invest more money in infrastructure, make the research-and-development tax credit for businesses permanent and allow companies to deduct more expenses right away. His advisers also began discussing ideas for his next State of the Union, like a payroll tax holiday, ideas that ultimately were worked into last month’s tax deal with Republicans instead.

The president’s search for an agenda that will excite him, and the rest of America, has taken him to the far corners of the economic conversation. He recently asked advisers to present arguments about whether the slow recovery is part of an economic cycle that will ultimately turn around or something different, a “new normal” signaling stagnation as in Japan in the 1990s. “He’s trying to gather different ideas and different perspectives both on where we are and where we’re going,” Goolsbee said.

In the end, Obama concluded that the economic moment is part of a cycle. He has to hope so. The unemployment rate drifted down to 9.4 percent in December from a high of 9.8 percent, but largely because many people gave up looking for work; the economy added just 100,000 jobs last month, not enough to keep up with population growth. Economists say the economy needs to grow 2.5 percent a year just to absorb newcomers to the labor force. It takes roughly 2 percentage points of growth over that to cut unemployment by 1 percentage point. “That’s a very different kind of challenge than putting out a financial fire,” Geithner told me.

The tax deal between Obama and Republicans amounted to a second stimulus package, and economists responded by upgrading growth projections for 2011 to around 3.5 percent. But even if that optimism is borne out, and the pace is maintained, unemployment would still be about 8 percent when voters pass judgment on Obama’s presidency in 2012. His political advisers hope that the direction of the economy will be clear enough to satisfy voters, as it was in 1984 when Ronald Reagan was re-elected despite more than 7 percent unemployment.

The slow recovery is typical of recessions that follow a financial crisis, as outlined in “This Time Is Different,” a book by the economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart. “They’re deeper, they last longer and it takes years for unemployment to come back,” Rogoff told me last month, shortly after a meeting with Obama. While crediting the president for averting a catastrophe, Rogoff said Obama erred by not preparing the country for a drawn-out and painful recovery. “The biggest tactical mistake he made and the administration made,” he said, “was they wanted to be reassuring to everyone, so they painted this rosy picture, saying we’re going to bounce back.” After two years, he said, the president has essentially done everything he can and must wait to see if it works. “What’s going to happen with unemployment and the economy is largely set at this point,” he said. “He’s taken his decisions, and now it will unfold and things will begin to improve.”