What will Obama do now?

The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.: The message to President Barack Obama from the election could not have been plainer: Don’t abandon your goals. Change your way of operating.

There will be a temptation to interpret the Democrats’ losses as a rejection of Obama’s first-term agenda, the one on which he was elected in 2008.

American voters are not that flighty or unsettled.

He should return to his original design for governing, which emphasized outreach to Republicans and subordination of party-oriented strategies.

The voters have in effect liberated him from his confining alliances with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and put him in a position where he can and must negotiate with a much wider range of legislators, including Republicans.

Obama tried governing on the model preferred by congressional Democrats and the result was the loss of Democratic seats and his own reputation. Now he should try governing his own way. It cannot work worse.