Washington — President Obama is likely to play a more active role in the race to succeed him than any outgoing president in the modern era. But in addition to campaigning for fellow Democrats, he’s also aiming to ensure lasting footprint for his governing philosophy.

In the summer and fall, Obama will preach the virtues of compromise, incrementalism and debate rooted in truth as paths to lasting progress, aides said. Already, Obama has offered a glimpse of the message that will be central to his argument.

“As you look at the world, be guided by an honest and clear-eyed assessment,” he told graduating cadets at the Air Force Academy last week. “Remember what you learned at this academy — the importance of evidence and facts and judgment.”

For a president who burst on to the national stage with a message of unity and the promise of hope and change, Obama’s valedictory message, drawing on the lessons of his seven-plus years in the White House, speaks to his frustration with increasingly cynical discourse and a political conversation he sees as drifting away from objective reality.

Such a contemplative philosophy is hardly an easy sell in a hyperpartisan and on-demand era. But the shift in politics toward partisan poles is driving the president to make his case, directing it at times to his liberal allies as much as the electorate as a whole.

“If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want,” Obama said in a commencement address at Howard University last month. “I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.”

The president has stayed neutral in the Democratic presidential race and praised both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders for keeping their primary fight mostly to the issues. But his message of late conveys a preference for Clinton’s approach to governance to Sanders’, favoring her advocacy of practical progressivism over his call for “revolution.”

At Rutgers University in May, Obama evoked the long struggle of suffragists and civil rights leaders to achieve equal voting rights.

“Each stage along the way required compromise. Sometimes you took half a loaf,” he said. “That’s how democracy works. So you’ve got to be committed to participating not just if you get immediate gratification, but you’ve got to be a citizen full time, all the time.”