SPRINGFIELD, Ill. >> President Barack Obama on Wednesday came to the place where he began his historic campaign for the White House nine years ago to the day, to reckon with perhaps his presidency’s greatest failure: his unfulfilled promise to lift American politics above toxic partisan divisions.

Speaking to a raucous joint session of the Illinois General Assembly at the state Capitol, Obama said, “The tone of our politics hasn’t gotten better since I was inaugurated; in fact, it has gotten worse.”

He continued: “One of my few regrets is my inability to reduce the polarization and meanness in our politics. I was able to be part of that here, and yet I couldn’t translate it the way I wanted to, to our politics in Washington.”

The president’s address, delivered a few blocks from the Old State Capitol, where he declared his candidacy on Feb. 10, 2007, was an elaboration of the themes he sounded in his State of the Union address in January, when he said the nation’s prosperity, even its very survival, hinged on restoring some comity to the bitter, dysfunctional political culture in Washington.

“It turns folks off,” Obama said of the atmosphere in Washington. “It discourages them; it makes them cynical. And when that happens, more powerful and extreme voices fill the void.”

He added, “What can we do, all of us together, to make our politics better?”

The speech came at a crucial moment in the contest to succeed him, one day after primary voters in New Hampshire awarded thumping victories to Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, insurgents who are challenging the political orthodoxy of the parties whose nomination they seek. Trump, with his harsh statements about Muslims and Hispanics, has contributed to the coarsening of the political dialogue that Obama laments.

The stinging defeat of Hillary Clinton, though expected, is something of a rebuke for his administration, given that she was Obama’s first secretary of state and is running as the custodian of his legacy.

Obama did not comment on the New Hampshire results in his speech, though he made oblique references to the campaign. Politics, he noted, needed to move from being “less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas.” He described himself as a progressive Democrat, winning an enthusiastic round of applause from a chamber dominated by members of his party.

“We’ve always gone through periods when our democracy seems stuck,” Obama said. “When that happens, we have to find a new way to do business.”

This was the first stop in an unusually long, six-day domestic swing for the president. On Thursday, he will attend several Democratic fundraisers in California before traveling to Rancho Mirage, where he plans to spend three days playing golf and will then host a summit meeting of leaders from the Association of Southeast Nations at the Sunnylands estate.

As he did on that frigid morning when he began his long-shot candidacy for president, Obama invoked Abraham Lincoln, his political hero, who condemned slavery in a speech at the Old State Capitol in 1858 by declaring, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

On Wednesday, Obama spoke at the current state Capitol, which stands as a monument to the bitter partisan divisions that the president has struggled fruitlessly to close. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, is locked in an impasse over the budget with the Democrats, who control the General Assembly, leaving the state in limbo. Public services have been maintained through stopgap funding.

Obama did not wade explicitly into that dispute, though he talked about the virtues of passing budgets. Instead, he offered recollections of his own introduction to the folkways of the Illinois Legislature — how one older lawmaker asked him if his last name was Irish; how another praised him for a speech that he said “changed a lot of minds” but not a lot of votes.

“We wouldn’t bend our deepest-held principles, but we were willing to forge compromises to achieve our goals,” he said. “If you were willing to listen, it was possible to bridge a lot of differences.”

At one point, a Democratic lawmaker, Ken Duncan, cried out, “That’s right!” when Obama said that a person who voted against his party should not be branded a sellout. Duncan missed a crucial vote when Democrats voted to override a veto of a labor contract by Rauner. “We’ll talk later, Ken,” Obama said to laughter and applause.

The president spoke out against gerrymandering, drawing applause from Republicans, who have recently been subjected to the practice in Illinois.

Obama spoke about his life as a young lawmaker in Springfield with an affection that he has never evinced for his brief time as a senator on Capitol Hill. He cited times when Democrats and Republicans in Springfield reached across the aisle, singling out his work on an ethics reform bill with Kirk Dillard, who was a Republican state senator. Dillard later took part in a round-table interview with The Chicago Tribune, along with two former Democratic state senators, Larry Walsh and Denny Jacobs.

Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate, from 1997 to 2004, and at one point mounted an unsuccessful bid for the House of Representatives. In 2004, he won a U.S. Senate seat, which he barely warmed before beginning his bid for the White House in the Illinois capital.

“It was here in Springfield,” he said of starting his campaign, “where I saw all that is America converge: farmers and teachers, businessmen and laborers, all of them with a story to tell, all of them seeking a seat at the table, all of them clamoring to be heard.”

Wednesday was rich in memories. Shortly after arriving here, Obama stopped at the Feed Store, a deli across the street from the Old State Capitol, which he had frequented as a state senator. The president, accompanied by two longtime aides, David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, shook hands with customers and employees, stopping to chat with a 6-year-old boy, Grant Moser, who was perched in front of a slice of cake.

Back outside, Obama shook hands with people shivering in front of the Old State Capitol, a Greek Revival-style building, lightly dusted in snow. He was clutching a white paper bag containing what he said was barley soup. At one point, he stopped to hug Dave Sullivan, who had been Republican state senator. The temperature was hovering at 19 degrees; Axelrod insisted that it was “balmy” compared with that day nine years ago.

© 2016 The New York Times Company