The president had an off-the-cuff response during his speech after applause broke out when he said, “I have no more campaigns to run.”
WASHINGTON — The morning after major Democratic losses in last year’s midterm elections, President Obama walked into the Roosevelt Room with a message for his despondent staff: I’m not done yet.
“These next two years are going to be the most interesting time in our lives,” he told them, according to a person in the meeting that day.
On Tuesday, Mr. Obama offered an estimated 30 million viewers a glimpse of that attitude when he delivered a self-assured, almost cocky State of the Union address after a year in which current and former White House advisers said he was often frustrated and at times discouraged.
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In the two years after the inaugural speech, Mr. Obama failed to enact much of his ambitious agenda: gun control, an immigration overhaul, climate change legislation, a bipartisan budget deal and a minimum-wage increase. Much of the president’s domestic agenda was hijacked by a series of overseas crises.
The lesson may be that even a powerful speech is no guarantee of success in a political environment where the opposition party controls Congress and a volatile world regularly surprises. But White House officials said the president remained an optimist.
“He feels better about things,” one top aide said. “He feels like what we’ve been doing is taking hold. That gives him confidence.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2015, on page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Political Gloom Lifting, an Ebullient Obama Goes for Broke. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
