Obama’s daring liberal agenda is neither daring nor liberal. Discuss.

If there was oneword that was used most often to describe President Obama’s second inaugural address Monday, it was “liberal.” Obama supposedly tossed away the post-partisan efforts of his first term and embraced big government, fully committing himself to the cause of gay rights and showing a Gore-like dedication to the climate-change fight.

Yet the next day, the White House expressed surprise at the notion that the president’s speech amounted to an affirmation of liberalism. Press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that he rejected “the idea that this was an ‘ism’ speech.” He added, “It’s on behalf of ideas that represent who we are as Americans.”

In a narrow sense, Carney was right. Opinion polls show that on almost all of the major positions Obama espoused in his speech — entitlements, immigration, climate change and same-sex marriage — a majority of Americans agree with him.

By that measure, Obama did not advance a liberal agenda. A consequential one, certainly, but one that reflects centrist views or center-left ones at most. The agenda seems liberal only when judged against the liberal-conservative divide we’re used to in Washington.

The speech may have been his bluntest declaration of these ideas, but it was no ideological breakthrough. Obama has been pushing this approach forcefully for the past year and a half.

It started in the summer of 2011, when his post-partisan efforts reached their end after he failed to strike a grand bargain with Republicans on the national debt. He then increasingly adopted an ideological message. In Osawatomie, Kan., that winter, he mounted an attack on income inequality — a subject of much interest to liberals — even while his proposed solutions (modestly higher taxes on the wealthy to preserve the services that the middle and lower classes depend on) were decidedly mainstream.

One of the most provocative lines in his inaugural address — equating the fight for gay rights at Stonewall with the fight for racial equality at Selma and the fight for gender equality at Seneca Falls — first appeared last May, when Obama delivered the commencement address at Barnard College, though it was little noticed then.

In some ways, one could regard Republicans as more ideologically daring than Obama. On many economic and social issues — whether trimming social services such as Medicaid or opposing any type of legal union for gay couples — the GOP backs positions that lack majority support in the country. But Republicans have shown a willingness to press forward on such ideas, which express moral or ideological convictions and appeal to a narrower slice of the electorate.

In his speech, by contrast, Obama hewed closely to public opinion. He defended “the commitments we make to each other through Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security” — but did not propose expanding the safety net.

“Judged on an absolute scale, going back to Roosevelt, that’s a pretty centrist or conservative position: ‘I’m opposed to cutting it,’ ” said James Stimson, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Back in the 1970s, the two parties jostled about who could be more generous in dispersing Social Security.”