Greenberg, the chairman and chief executive of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, said, “If Democrats are going to be encumbered by that link, they need to change voters’ feelings about government.”

Improving voters’ views of government before November 2012 may require tangible economic growth and new hiring; some threat to government (the Obama team imagines Republicans and their nominee as that threat); and a compelling second-term agenda that voters believe the incumbent is best qualified to execute, despite the headwinds of partisan polarization.

“The president has the bully pulpit, and on a personal level he has standing, but what is the narrative that he’s driving at this point? He needs some content to back those up,” said Republican pollster and message adviser David Winston, president of the Winston Group, a firm with ties to many House Republicans. “At this point, he seems like he’s just reacting to events and not driving them,” Winston told RCP.

The Obama administration is tethered to high unemployment; an unpopular $800 billion stimulus program; partisan disputes about deficit spending and the country’s debt load; a complicated health reform law assailed by Republicans as expensive and unworkable ahead of its 2014 implementation; plus Obama is still ramping down controversial U.S. operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, and embarked on a conflict in Libya.

“When I said ‘change we can believe in,’ ” the president said a few hours before his 50th birthday, “I didn’t say ‘change we can believe in tomorrow,’ not ‘change we can believe in next week.’ We knew this was going to take time, because we’ve got this big, messy, tough democracy.”

To woo independent voters and to navigate the undertow of divided government, Obama has adapted elements of his 2008 campaign ambitions to fit the national emergencies he faced, to hug the political middle, or to await a second term. Some observers note that for all of Obama’s grand speeches, his presidency -- and even the man himself -- may still seem opaque to many Americans. Congress and events have defined him, rather than the reverse.

“I don’t think the president has an easily understood narrative of his presidency, partly because of his centrist views and partly because he has had to focus on staving off disaster,” Edwards said. The continuation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the president’s support for the Recovery Act, and administration war policies all responded to inherited events, not his campaign agenda. “His most notable proactive policy, health care reform, has been a difficult sell in the Tea Party era,” he added.

When George W. Bush campaigned for a second term, assailing opponent Sen. John Kerry at every turn, he frequently appealed to audiences by poking fun at his own stubbornness and mangled syntax, ending his riff with warm assurances that “you know me.” Even after nearly three years in office, it is hard to imagine Obama using that phrase on the stump.

Although the president was sorely buffeted by eruptions throughout his first term -- including during the debt-ceiling battle -- many of the president’s advocates predict he has time to explain where he wants to take the country, boast of being a “tough stuff” leader, and win in the aftermath of the most severe recession and economic turmoil since World War II.

“I think Obama’s challenge now, going forward, is to draw a dividing line [with Republicans], the point of which . . . also has to set out his overall rationale for the country,” said longtime Democratic campaign consultant Robert Shrum. “It can’t just be a referendum; it has to be a choice, and he has the capacity to define that choice.”

In an interview, Shrum said that “Obama has a great opportunity to shape the contours of the decision” -- in ways that clearly define how the parties view government -- during the prolonged period into 2012 when Republican candidates are battling one another for the nomination.

Campaigning in the rear-view mirror by blaming Bush for accumulated woes won’t prove productive, Shrum predicted. And while the anti-Washington mood in the country is real, so too is growing national resistance to Tea Party conservatives after the debt-default brinksmanship, he said.

A GOP nominee, scarred after tough primaries and dragged into legislative battles by firebrands in Congress, could easily play to the president’s campaign strengths. That’s why David Winston said he reminds Republicans that “just because people are unhappy with the president doesn’t mean they’re going to vote for somebody else. The Republican candidates have the challenge to come up with that compelling idea that shows people they’re ready to govern.”