“I take some responsibility on that. I — I think that some of it was circumstances. If you look at — what happened, I came in in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. And unlike FDR who waited– well, didn’t take office until about three years into the Great Depression, it was happening just as I was elected. I think we did a really good job in saving this economy and putting us back on the track of growth. But what that meant is in 2010 there were a lot of folks who were still out of work. There were a lot of folks who had lost their homes or saw their home values plummet, their 401k’s plummet. And we were just at the beginnings of a recovery. And the, you know, whoever is president at that point is gonna get hit and his party’s gonna get hit. That then means that suddenly you’ve got a redistricting in which a lot of state legislatures are now Republican. They draw lines that give a huge structural advantage in subsequent elections.

“So — so some of this was circumstances . But what I think that what is also true is that partly because my docket was really full here, so I couldn’t be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as Commander-in-Chief and President of the United States. We did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.”