The question of Obama’s plans for his second term go beyond simple campaign tactics. In part, the President is waging his own negative campaign. He’s promised to stop (or prevent) the so-called “war on women,” and thus protect the right to medical services, including birth control. (Obama supports abortion rights, but doesn’t talk about it much.) He promises to prevent a rollback of environmental protections, but he doesn’t suggest he’ll go much further than he’s already gone. He calls his energy program “all of the above,” a name that purports to turn a reluctance to establish priorities into a virtue…

In 2009, Obama arrived in the White House accompanied by solid Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate, so his big plans—say, on health care—had a realistic chance of coming to fruition. His majority has disappeared in the House and shrunk in the Senate, and it seems a virtual certainty that the Democratic heights of those first two years are out of reach for the foreseeable future. In this way, then, Obama’s refusal to lay out visionary ideas amounts to a recognition of political reality. If he can’t push through a legislative agenda, the theory appears to go, then what’s the point of proposing one?

That attitude, if it persists, cedes a great deal of ground to Obama’s adversaries, not only Mitt Romney.