OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

Obama is animated by a sense that, looking at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in much better shape than the public appreciates, especially when measured against the depths of the financial crisis and the possibility -- now rarely even considered -- that things could have been much, much worse. Over a series of conversations in the Oval Office, on Air Force One and in Florida, Obama analyzed, sometimes with startling frankness, nearly every element of his economic agenda since he came into office. His economy has certainly come further than most people recognize. The private sector has added jobs for 73 consecutive months -- some 14.4 million new jobs in all -- the longest period of sustained job growth on record. Unemployment, which peaked at 10 percent the year Obama took office, the highest it had been since 1983, under Ronald Reagan, is now 5 percent, lower than when Reagan left office. The budget deficit has fallen by roughly $1 trillion during his two terms. And overall U.S. economic growth has significantly outpaced that of every other advanced nation.

Gene Sperling, the former director of the National Economic Council who spent hours inside the Oval Office debating and devising the president's economic strategy, told me, "If we were back in early 2009 -- when we were coming to work every morning with clenched stomachs, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs a month and the Dow under 7,000 -- and someone said that by your last year in office, unemployment would be 5 percent, the deficit would be under 3 percent, AIG would have turned a profit and we made all our money back on the banks, that would've been beyond anybody's wildest expectations." [...]

Beyond the messaging challenge, Obama faced a practical bind as well: Just as he was trying to reinflate the economy, he was also being forced to cut government jobs, under pressure from Republicans who contended that government bloat and the cost of it could create our next financial crisis. Call it an anti-stimulus. "This is the first recovery where you actually saw the government work force decline, and that created this massive fiscal drag throughout the recovery," Obama said. [...]

Often in our conversations, the president expressed a surprising degree of identification with America's business leaders. "If I hadn't gone into politics and public service," Obama told me, "the challenges of creating a business and growing a business and making it work would probably be the thing that was most interesting to me." His showy embrace of capitalism was especially notable given his fractious relationship with Wall Street and the business community for much of his first term. [....]

When the president's motorcade left Saft to head back to Air Force One, I noticed something unusual: The plant's parking lot was extremely small. It dawned on me that Obama's tour of the factory, filled with photo ops and handshakes, had included very little interaction with workers. Instead, he was shown machine after machine, mostly operated by computers. At one point, he was introduced to WALL-E, a robot named after the Pixar film that takes battery components from a tray. No employees necessary. This giant mecca of innovation, a physical marvel that if built several decades ago would have easily employed a few thousand people, employs only 300.

It was a scene that underscored a challenge facing the U.S. economy and one that may be the driving factor behind greater inequality: We're not only losing jobs to overseas competition, we're losing them to technology. Obama noted the robots, too. "We just saw here those robots were pretty impressive, but also pointed to the direction the economy is going," he said.

He clearly recognizes the problem -- he said he spends a lot of time thinking about it -- but he also knows the solutions will come only when he is long out of office. Many citizens, he said, back on Air Force One, "have to worry about retraining at some point in their careers, because they can't anticipate being in one place for 30 years. The occupational mix in the economy places greater demands on people because it's changing more rapidly. And all of this makes people feel that they don't know what's around the corner." For whatever sense of "uncertainty" business leaders lament, this may be a much more profound sense of uncertainty.

"It's one of the reasons that I pursued the Trans-Pacific Partnership," he said, bringing up the free-trade pact that, uniquely, has divided both parties, "not because I'm not aware of all the failures of some past trade agreements and the disruptions to our economy that occurred as a consequence of globalization, but rather my assessment that most trends are irreversible given the nature of global supply chains, and so we better be out there shaping the rules in ways that allow for higher labor standards overseas, or try to export our environmental standards overseas so that we have more of a level playing field."

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