Will Obama find his inner Clinton?

But don’t expect Obama to go full Bubba in 2015, say both those closest to the president and Republicans gearing up for a wave of new confrontations with a White House focused on securing the president’s place in history.

Though Obama compromised with Republicans on keeping the government funded in 2015, his last 12 months were defined by a growing habit of flexing constitutionally hazy executive muscle.

With fewer allies in Congress and GOP leaders dead set on undoing his unilateral initiatives, the president is unlikely to take away the same lessons from embarrassing midterm defeats as Clinton did in 1994.

“I don’t think Obama is Bill Clinton,” said former Rep. Bob Walker, R-Pa., a key figure in the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994. “Clinton had a political survival instinct that led him to realize, ‘I’ve got to look like a part of the governing process.’ Obama thinks he has the capacity to remake the world, and he’ll be damned if he’s going to let a Republican Congress get in his way.”

That philosophy soon will be put to the test. Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has promised an early January vote on approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, and conservatives will attempt to roll back in February the president’s plan to spare up to 5 million illegal immigrants from deportation.

Obama has vetoed just two bills since entering the Oval Office, a total the president could eclipse soon after the new Senate majority takes over and pushes the legislation through the upper chamber.

The White House has hinted at additional executive action on closing the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, combating climate change and completing a nuclear deal with Iran.

Yet, Obama and Republicans could find common ground on stalled trade deals, modest tax reform and infrastructure spending, among other packages that could lay the foundation for more wide-ranging agreements.

Republicans saw an opening for working with the president in mid-December, when Obama infuriated his own party by signing off on a spending deal opposed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and a wide collection of his most loyal supporters in Washington.

But just as political observers anticipated a more conciliatory era in the Obama presidency, the commander in chief surprisingly started diplomatic talks with Cuba, scrapping policies on the books for a half-century and inviting GOP indignation.

Coupled with Obama’s power play on immigration and the finalization of a climate deal with China, the lame-duck session served as arguably the president’s most aggressive stretch of 2014.

The lesson for 2015, one member of Obama’s inner circle said, is that the president is less concerned with whom he angers in enacting his agenda.

“He doesn’t really care as much about who is going to be pissed with what he does — either Republicans or Democrats,” a former Obama adviser told the Washington Examiner. “He doesn’t have enough time left to worry about hurt feelings. If he wants to do something, he’s going to do it. What does he have to lose at this point?”

Even some Democrats would counter, however, that Obama has plenty to lose.

The massive Democratic losses in the 2014 midterm elections were essentially a referendum on the Obama White House, and Republicans are eager to frame the 2016 presidential contest in a similar fashion.

Two more years of Obama circumventing Congress would force Hillary Clinton or any other liberal presidential contender to defend governing tactics opposed by most Americans or distance themselves from the head of the Democratic Party.

“It could get awkward,” conceded the former Obama adviser of the dynamic between the White House and the party’s leading candidates in 2016.

“But the president played the do-no-harm card in 2014. It didn’t help anybody,” he said of Obama going quiet and giving space to vulnerable Democrats up for re-election.

Obama hasn’t secured a legacy-defining initiative legislatively since 2010, when the Democratic-led Congress delivered Obamacare to the president’s desk.

For the first time since then, the president will encounter one-party control of Congress, undermining the White House’s reasoning that Obama should not worry about outreach to lawmakers unable to pass bills.

And even the president seems to think GOP leaders could return to Washington with a new mindset, wanting to prove they can produce tangible results.

“Now you’ve got Republicans in a position where it’s not enough for them simply to grind the wheels of Congress to a halt and then blame me,” Obama said in an interview Monday with NPR.

Conservatives counter that they have lacked a partner at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

“It wasn’t like this with Clinton or with Bush, they both had a very effective legislative team — they came, they fought, they worked for things,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told the Examiner. “Obama’s strategy is to do a message of the week. He’s never good about follow-through. [The presidency] is not a 9-to-5-job.”

In predicting how the president would approach 2015, political analysts opted to judge Obama’s path through the prism of his first six years in office, not just the isolated compromise during a spending fight the White House wanted to avoid.

“I think we have to distinguish between things that have to be done legislatively, like appropriations bills, and things the president can do through his own actions,” said David Rhode, a political scientist and director of the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Duke University.

“I don’t anticipate there will be a lot of things of significance that Congress and the president agree on,” he added. “At this point, the legacy is what matters most to him.”