The response from Democrats: About time you came around.

At a Univision presidential forum in Florida on Thursday afternoon, Obama said the most important lesson he learned in office is that “you can’t change Washington from the inside. You can only change it from the outside.”

The comment could seem like a striking reversal — or outright admission of failure — on one of Obama’s fundamental promises in his first campaign: If elected president, he would remake Washington.

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Almost immediately, Mitt Romney took to the microphone in Sarasota, Fla., accusing Obama of waving “the white flag of surrender” about getting government to work. And the Obama campaign’s rush to respond with a series of statements and a new Web video indicated they believed the Republican nominee might have found a way to turn around his troubled week.

But Democrats in Washington and beyond said Obama was simply telling the truth. Mr. Hope and Change hasn’t changed Washington, they agreed, but explaining why not and urging Americans to work together to finally make change happen is a way to inspire voters to take ownership of this election. Stop pining for John F. Kennedy, for Nelson Mandela. Just grind out a win and get ready for four more years of the same.

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Former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said his own experience as a congressman and governor had always made him skeptical about Obama’s promise of change. Strickland felt that way in the 2008 election — when he endorsed Hillary Clinton. At a meeting in the White House after his own 2010 reelection loss, he tried to warn Obama that he faced “people who would let this country go straight to hell rather than strike a deal.”

“Do I wish that all the members of Congress would love each other and do what’s best for the country? Yes. Do I think that’s realistic? No. This is a fight that’s got to be fought,” Strickland said. “I am not delusional. I’m a realist.”

He said he was glad to see the president move from open hand to clenched fist, railing not just about the idea of Washington but about the specific people in the town who are standing in his way.

“I believed for quite some time that the president had extended himself beyond what any reasonable person could expect to find accommodations,” Strickland said. “I believe he is on the right course now.”

And that’s the right course, argued Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), even if that means Obama’s admitting his naïveté in 2008.

“I think honesty is a good policy,” Welch said.

“I have to say to some of my Democratic colleagues: We don’t have a right to be disappointed. The challenges we face require a shoulder to the grindstone,” Welch said. “I think all of us have some responsibility to understand when you win an election, and the hope is high, the hard work is ahead.”

What Obama said, argued former Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), was “stating the obvious,” and Romney seizing on the comment amounted to absurd revisionist history.

“The president did promise to change the tone in Washington,” Dorgan said. “But those who prevented him from achieving that goal are now blaming him for failing. That stands logic on its head. As Bill Clinton said: ‘It takes a lot of brass.’”

“Change is hard,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who was elected in 2010 and served through a gridlocked Congress. “And my view is that change is absolutely necessary in Washington. And I’m going to continue fighting for it and I think the president will as well. Whatever he may have said, I think his resolve and his resilience is still very much there.”

Obama’s comments, said Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), reflect exactly why he should still be thought of as “the real agent of change” — even four years later, he’s still pushing.

“I don’t remember him saying I will change it all in my first term,” Polis said.

And, Polis added, the way Obama has adapted to the resistance in Washington is reason to be optimistic about his ability to combat gridlock in his second term.

“He’s been more willing to use the powers of the executive for change,” Polis said, citing especially Obama’s use of executive authority to change federal policy in areas such as deportation policy. “I would hope that the president would continue to be emboldened in a second term to move the country forward with his mandate for change.”

Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell — who said his own arrival in Harrisburg gave him empathy for Obama’s lack of preparation for the partisanship — said he has high hopes for what Obama would actually get done in a second term: Simpson-Bowles, a short term investment agenda, energy independence, infrastructure — just to name a few.

“Everyone would have hoped that the president would have come in and reached all of his goals. But that’s not realistic for anybody,” Rendell said. “Look at FDR — most of the great things that FDR did were in the second term, not the first.”

Asked if Obama would also need to get elected four times to achieve his promises in his first race, Rendell said, “He’ll be all right.”

Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the president’s comments fit within his overall theme of work left to do.

“Whether it is implementing the Affordable Care Act so that millions of people have access to affordable health care, working with members of both parties to get comprehensive immigration reform done or building on the half-million jobs that we’ve already created in the manufacturing sector,” Psaki said, “the president believes there is more work to do for the American people.”

Democratic consultant Karen Finney recalled Obama arguing at the 2008 Democratic Convention that “the change we need doesn’t come from Washington. Change comes to Washington.” There’s a straight line, she said, from Denver through Obama’s “you did that” refrain in his Charlotte acceptance speech to what he said on Univision. And for Democrats who really saw Obama as a movement four years ago, what he said in Florida on Thursday should be a reminder of that.

“Particularly in our current culture, we think, ‘OK, four years, what did you get done?’” Finney said. “Well, think about the civil rights movement. The point that we need to remind ourselves as a country is that change is happening all the time, and we have to continue the work of making change happen. It’s not like we’re going to wake up one day and the birds are singing and everything’s perfect.”

But if Obama’s set himself a different standard of change now, that may prove just as hard — if not harder, said Steve Hildebrand, a deputy national campaign manager for Obama in 2008. If the president really wants to get change in his second term, he’ll have to take a firm hand in getting more people than just himself elected.

“I think it’s going to take a president spending time across this country recruiting new kinds of leaders who will refuse PAC money and refuse lobbyist money, who will go to Washington with less strings attached then the crop we have there right now,” said Hildebrand, who left presidential politics and is now running a coffee shop in Sioux Falls, S.D. “It’s going to take a president to build grass-roots organizations all over the country that [put] pressure on Washington to make the needed change.”

Because, Hildebrand said, dusty and battered as that old message might seem, people still crave it — and Obama remains the person who could give them what they need.

“There’s a percentage of the population who doesn’t believe this president has captured enough change. But people still want change,” Hildebrand said. “He’s got the capacity to rally those people in this country to seek that needed change.”

Manu Raju and Reid J. Epstein contributed to this report.