President Barack Obama listens to a question at the White House Forum on He...

When Barack Obama was considering running for president in 2006, the political strategist who had engineered his Senate victory two years earlier bluntly stated a potentially fatal concern.

"I don't know if you are Muhammad Ali or Floyd Patterson when it comes to taking a punch," David Axelrod wrote Obama.

Then and now, that's the question: When the going gets rough, as it did in the campaign and has many times over the first seven-plus months of his presidency, does Obama flinch or fight.

Well, both.

There's a pattern to Obama's responses to difficulty or intransigence, whether in foreign and domestic affairs: typically Mr. Nice Guy at first, combative only when forced, and ever-ready to deal in the margins. He flinches and then fights, or fights and then flinches.

Of course it depends on who is doing the judging. Many fellow Democrats think Obama is a wuss for not pushing hard for the boldest health care overhaul, for instance, while many Republicans are openly admiring of his aggressive stance on Afghanistan.

And it depends on the circumstances.

"He knows how to count," said Stephen Wayne, a Georgetown University presidential scholar. "When you get down to the core of his ambitions, then he'll fight. ... But before he puts the gloves on, he's going to take a pretty hard look at whether he has a chance to win."

In that November 2006 memo, first revealed in "The Battle for America 2008" by Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, Axelrod worried about Obama's "ability to put up with something you have never experienced on a sustained basis: criticism." What's more, even if Obama could take the heat, Axelrod wondered whether Obama would have what it takes to fight back — to turn fiasco into opportunity.

As Wayne says now: "He's very risk averse."

But Obama demonstrated during the campaign that he was plenty tough. He survived long, brutal primaries, hard-to-defend statements by his pastor and a more difficult fall fight against Republican John McCain than his operation had planned for.

In fact, the Axelrod memo could have been more a psychological tactic — designed as a kick in the pants rather than as true concern. In an interview this past week, the adviser didn't say, but he did insist the campaign helped Obama hone a style he now uses as president.

"His approach is to keep his eye on the ball and not get bogged down in the tempest of the moment," he said. "He is ultimately a principled pragmatist. He knows where he wants to go, and he's not dogmatic about how to get there."

As president, Obama has dug in against persistent critics or stiff opposition in order to press for a broad, long-term goal.

For instance, the president came into office promising to stop rewarding North Korea's provocations but also offering to talk with the country's leaders about its nuclear weapons program. He got only belligerence in return.

So even though the North recently made conciliatory moves, such as freeing two American journalists, the Obama administration said "no way" to the North's new offer to negotiate, because the reclusive communist government wants talks only with the U.S., not the entire group of nations involved in the established six-party negotiations.

With Iran, too, Obama started by offering a new tone and then took a tougher stance this summer, saying Tehran has until the middle of September to negotiate with international partners or face "further steps."

On the domestic front, Obama faced an immediate standoff over his proposed economic stimulus package.

Obama had made a big play for bipartisanship but Republicans rebelled, defining his package as too costly. The president then switched to buck-stops-here talk — and he got a bill, fast. But his victory didn't come without agreeing to scale back the plan's scope by cutting its spending and deepening its tax cuts.

He won, but not without taking a few punches. Like boxer Ali. And Floyd Patterson, too, first-round knockouts by Sonny Liston to the contrary.

Now, health care overhaul is Obama's biggest domestic goal and a do-or-die battle for his early presidency. The end of this story is unwritten, with Congress due back to Washington this coming week to take up a debate that has grown messy and ugly.

Obama is following a familiar arc.

He decided to leave the details of bill-writing to Congress and pursued bipartisan negotiations, hoping that would be more effective than trying to ram something down lawmakers' throats. The debate then slipped from his grasp, with a conservative outcry that dominated town hall meetings and summer coverage.

The president intends to burst back on the scene. Aides say that in Wednesday night's prime-time address to a joint session of Congress he plans to both jawbone Republicans and signal compromise.

In other words, he'll fight and flinch.

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Jennifer Loven has covered the White House since 2002.

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