"We probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history," President Barack Obama says. | AP Photo Obama blames communication skills for electoral losses

Democrats might have held onto one or both houses of Congress if only Americans better understood the strength of the economic recovery, President Barack Obama said in an interview published Thursday.

“I mean, the truth of the matter is that if we had been able to more effectively communicate all the steps we had taken to the swing voter,” Obama remarked in a New York Times Magazine interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, “then we might have maintained a majority in the House or the Senate.”


The U.S. economy is in a better state after the recession than the American people realize, Obama suggested.

“I actually compare our economic performance to how, historically, countries that have wrenching financial crises perform,” he said. “By that measure, we probably managed this better than any large economy on Earth in modern history.”

The president also expressed regret that, in three successive years, his administration was not able to kick-start “a massive infrastructure project,” adding that 2012, 2013 and 2014 “was the perfect time to do it; low interest rates, construction industry is still on its heels, massive need — the fact that we failed to do that, for example, cost us time.

“It meant that there were folks who we could have helped and put back to work and entire communities that could have prospered that ended up taking a lot longer to recover,” Obama said.

Obama also said he is "[kept] up at night some times” by the fact that he could have done more to hasten the economic recovery.

“I can probably tick off three or four common-sense things we could have done where we’d be growing a percentage or two faster each year,” he said. “We could have brought down the unemployment rate lower, faster. We could have been lifting wages even faster than we did.”

Obama also weighed in on the dispute between Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over how best to break up overly large banks and seemed to take a shot at Sanders.

“It is true that we have not dismantled the financial system, and in that sense, Bernie Sanders’ critique is correct,” he told Sorkin, with thinly veiled sarcasm. “But one of the things that I’ve consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It’s not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences.”

The president offered a harsher critique of the economic platforms coming from the other side of the aisle.

“If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of the current Republican candidates for president, they don’t simply defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy,” Obama said. “Slashing taxes particularly for those at the very top, dismantling regulatory regimes that protect our air and our environment and then projecting that this is going to lead to 5 percent or 7 percent growth, and claiming that they’ll do all this while balancing the budget. Nobody would even, with the most rudimentary knowledge of economics, think that any of those things are plausible.”