It's a question of context

They suggest that among presidents, he ranks as the most learned since John Quincy Adams, the most profound since James Madison and the most visionary since Thomas Jefferson. And he is, of course, the most rhetorically gifted politician since Pericles.

Yet, remarkably, he is frequently misunderstood. How can this be? After the June 8 news conference in which he said "the private sector is doing fine," he, responding to the public's strange inability to parse plain English, held another news conference in which he said: "It's absolutely clear the economy is not doing fine; that's the reason I had a press conference."