"If this were a Republican president and Republican government, the advisors around it would be selling this as the most successful three years of a presidency in years. They’d start by saying, “When my guy took office, we were losing four hundred thousand jobs a month. That would mean fourteen million less jobs if we continued along that pace. And it stopped immediately. We saved the auto industry. We passed a health-care bill that no one could pass” — although Republicans wouldn’t have wanted that. “We killed Osama bin Laden.” You could go down the list of things that you could brag about. But Democrats are terrible at selling. So they’re just kind of apologizing, and everybody feels disillusioned."