Mr. Obama was a great policy maker, but not a great party builder. In the face of Republican intransigence, he still managed to get things done. But the strategies that made him successful — passing legislation by the narrowest partisan majority, refraining from boasting about what his reforms accomplished and, in the end, falling back on executive orders — are exactly what make his legacy so vulnerable.

Congressional Democrats frequently complained that the president’s approach put them at risk. Seeking to expand government with a hidden hand, his policies were designed in such a way that made it hard for Democrats to claim credit for them. In public, he played down the scale of policies like the stimulus package so that they would not attract too much attention, or criticism. Whereas President Franklin D. Roosevelt made it clear that every public works project was a product of the New Deal, Americans usually had no idea what programs came from Mr. Obama’s stimulus.

In other words, while I thought a workhorse is what we need in a president, we need a salesman as well. Now, some of this is on the press, but I do know that, in the stimulus at the beginning of his presidency, he chose to downplay the tax credits early on because there was evidence that a lot of people tend to look at those as short term things and won’t adjust their spending habits because of it.