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.”

Whether a president can truly improve, or damage, an economy remains an open question. The greatest economic power might in fact remain in the hands of the Federal Reserve. Economists credit the Fed’s policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up the economy and bring unemployment down. At the same time, the Fed has been blamed for widening inequality, swelling the price of real estate and corporate profits, even as savers and retirees dependent on fixed-income assets have suffered.

That can cut either way in terms of a president’s economic legacy. Critics of Obama, including the new House speaker, Paul Ryan, credit Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman, and Janet Yellen, the current chairwoman, for whatever recovery we’ve had since the crisis, contending it happened in spite of the president. “I think the Federal Reserve has done more,” Ryan said at a January news conference. Frank, for his part, almost jumped through the phone when I mentioned that argument during an interview. “And Bernanke and Yellen were appointed by whom? Neither Bernanke or Yellen would have been able to do what they were doing without his full backing.”

Ultimately, however, Obama said the lessons of his time in office are being misunderstood in the election campaigns. “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.”

He continued: “If we can’t puncture some of the mythology around austerity, politics or tax cuts or the mythology that’s been built up around the Reagan revolution, where somehow people genuinely think that he slashed government and slashed the deficit and that the recovery was because of all these massive tax cuts, as opposed to a shift in interest-rate policy — if we can’t describe that effectively, then we’re doomed to keep on making more and more mistakes.”