I have seen two theories behind President Obama’s speech tonight:

1. The White House has seen brutal polling which shows that independents and weakly identifying Democrats are disapproving of his ISIS policy (and his foreign policy generally) in larger numbers and that they are moving to the “strongly disapprove” position. If Obama lets the Democratic brand become toxic among these voters, we could be looking at President Cruz, to go along with GOP majorities of both houses of Congress. He needs to get these people back by showing bipartisan competence.

2. He plans to rally the forty percent or so of the public that is with him no matter what, demonize the opposition, and lay down a marker for his own party. You are either with me, or you are with the party of machine gun Jesus. The point isn’t necessarily to win the next election (though that would be nice.) It is to consolidate the center-left coalition around his views so that the next time demographics and favorable circumstances produce undivided liberal governance, Democrats won’t hesitate to do something major about guns – just like Obama didn’t hesitate to do something major about health care policy when he was president and the Democrats had supermajorities.

If Obama is going with the first strategy, he will sound more like his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention when he talked about how there is no Red America and no Blue America. If Obama is going with the second strategy, he will sound more like he did in his press conference after the 2014 midterm elections where he proclaimed himself the winner of the previous night’s fictional (but somehow more legitimate) election among the people who didn’t vote.

My guess is that it will be somewhat closer to the second of those two extremes. It would be a pleasant surprise if he could do what Bush did after the 2006 midterm elections and admit that his strategy isn’t working and lay out a new strategy. It doesn’t have to be a strategy that I have to agree with, just an acknowledgement of what everyone can already see.