He tried to look humbled. He even said he understood - sort of - why voters recoiled at his policies. But the acts of contrition paled in comparison to the swagger of the smartest person in the room.
The day after Republicans won their biggest majority in the House of Representatives since 1946, handing the President's party its worst midterm election defeat since 1938, Barack Obama insisted it's not about him.
The White House is a "bubble," he explained. Even a "couple of great communicators" such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton got their midterm butts kicked in a bad economy.
Besides, it could soon be 2008 all over again. So, why change now?
"I mean, folks didn't have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year," the nonplussed President told a White House press conference, referring to his breakout victory in the state's 2008 Democratic caucuses. "They got a pretty good look at me, up close and personal. And they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and you know, I think they understood that my story was theirs."
Translation: I'm not a snob. I'm you.
Of all the challenges Mr. Obama must overcome if he is to win a second term in 2012 - from outmanoeuvring an emboldened GOP majority in the House to rebuilding bridges with a sulking business community - the biggest may be his unwavering confidence.
"Obama's problem is that he is not insecure," one Democratic member of Congress recently told The New York Times. "He always believes he is the smartest person in any room and never feels the sense of panic that makes a good politician run scared all the time."
Inviting reporters to compare him to Mr. Reagan and Mr. Clinton is not the brightest idea when neither of them experienced the "shellacking" Mr. Obama has just taken. Mr. Clinton's Democrats lost 52 House seats in the 1994 midterm vote. Mr. Reagan's GOP took a 26-seat hit in 1982, when unemployment was more than a percentage point higher than it is now.
When all the counting, and recounting, is done, Republicans will return to Congress in January with at least 60 more seats in the House and about six more in the Senate.
In 1982, the Gipper ran on an astonishingly similar message to the one Mr. Obama reiterated for weeks on the midterm campaign trail. Mr. Reagan insisted he had inherited "the worst economic mess in half a century." He was "slowly, but surely lifting the economy out of the mess created over the past several decades," mostly by Democrats.
Mr. Obama stuck with the same stump speech. Republicans drove the economy into the ditch, then watched unhelpfully - "sipping on Slurpees" - while Democrats endeavoured to push it out of the gutter.
Mr. Reagan had a very different policy prescription for the economy - hefty tax and spending cuts - than Mr. Obama's interventionist approach. And there was even less objective evidence of an incipient economic recovery in the fall of 1982 than there is today.
Yet, Mr. Reagan was able to stay the course in large part because he had established a bond with the American people. "If we stick to our plan, if we keep the Congress from going back to its runaway spending, the recovery will take hold, strengthen and endure," he promised.
Mr. Obama, among the most intelligent men to occupy the Oval Office, lacks the one thing presidents need in order to get Americans to stick with them through tough times: a connection. Even the most inspired policies may fail to find favour with voters unless they trust the judgment of the person pitching them.
Mr. Obama has been unable to shake his elitist label. He remains awkward without a speech to deliver or argument to make.
Asked jokingly whether he would have a conciliatory Slurpee with John Boehner, the presumptive Republican Speaker, Mr. Obama struggled for a moment before uttering: "Uh, they're delicious drinks."
The familiarity of a president with the inside of a 7-Eleven is not the measure of his greatness. But if Mr. Obama cannot count on Mr. Clinton's aw-shucks ease to woo voters, then he must show a willingness to listen to them to regain their confidence.
Mr. Obama openly aspired to be like Franklin Roosevelt. Now, he has come closer than any president since FDR to matching the brutal midterm beating he took in 1938. That calls for more suppliance, less swagger.
Konrad Yakabuski