On the one hand, Michael Grynbaum’s article on Joe Biden’s media strategy in the New York Times reads like a typical complaint about access: “He has not sat for interviews with The Associated Press, The New York Times, Reuters, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal or USA Today.”

On the other hand, Grynbaum raises legitimate questions about whether Biden’s approach is failing.

As president, Donald J. Trump was a media maximalist whose unavoidable-for-comment style helped generate saturation news coverage, for better or worse.

President Biden has taken a stingier approach to his dealings with the press — and not all his allies believe it’s working out.

After nine months in office, Mr. Biden has conducted roughly a dozen one-on-one interviews with major print and television news outlets. That compares with more than 50 for Mr. Trump, and more than 100 for Barack Obama, in the same period, according to West Wing record keepers.

If the pulpit is one of a president’s most powerful tools of communication, Mr. Biden has opted to rely more heavily on fleeting, impromptu exchanges with White House reporters, often taking a few shouted questions as he boards a helicopter or exits a photo-op.

One thing to keep in mind is that whether you’re training a prizefighter, a chess champion, or advising the president of the United States, there are no one-size-fits-all answers. Everyone has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses, and this is true of the adversaries, too.  Media consumption patterns change, as does the makeup of the American electorate and the opposition party.

It seems self-evident that White House strategists don’t think having Biden speak extemporaneously or off-the-cuff plays to his strengths. He’s well known for making verbal gaffes, and he is beginning to slow down a bit at his approaches eighty years of age. The risk is that rather than managing and directing the news, he’ll make himself the story, and for the wrong reasons.

Joe Frazier didn’t beat Mohammed Ali in their first fight by dancing around in the middle of the ring. He applied relentless pressure and wore Ali down over 15 rounds. A similar strategy got Frazier knocked out when he tried to defend his title against George Foreman.

In the last chess championship, between Magnus Carlsen and Fabiano Caruana, Carlsen opted to pursue a draw in the last classical game even though he was in a slightly stronger position. This was because he knew the match would then go into a phase of rapid games with short time controls, and he was a much stronger rapid player. He calculated that he was more likely to blow a winning position in a classical game than to lose a tiebreak consisting of quick games. It worked. It’s unlikely Carlsen will use the same approach when he defends his title against GM Ian Nepomniachtchi, beginning of Friday, because Nepo is one of the strongest rapid players in the world.

Similarly, we can’t advise Biden to emulate Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama simply because they had success doing it their way. I think it’s quite obvious that Biden wouldn’t be good at using Twitter as his primary way of communicating with the public, so it’s not a matter of him failing to use the methods that worked for Trump.

The question then is less what Biden isn’t doing that was effective in the past than trying to identify strengths that are going unexploited. He needs to do something different, but he has to play to his unique strengths. One clear strength of Biden’s is his ability to connect with ordinary people, to talk on their level, to console them, to empathize with their problems, to let his basic decency shine through. That’s why the town hall format works pretty well for him, but it’s time consuming. A president can work in a few of these a year, but not much more than that. It’s also a hard format to control. It’s much easier to control an interview with a reporter from a major newspaper.

I think one area where Biden’s strengths could be better utilized is in developing a sharper partisanship, but one that casts indecency as the real opponent rather than the Republican Party per se. He can go into any community in the country and truthfully argue that he’s delivering for the people. He can say he’s bringing down the cost of prescription drugs and expanding broadband and repairing dangerous roads and bridges, and maybe their representatives are focused on producing viral tweets and nasty putdowns. Insults won’t help you pay for day care or a hearing aid.

He needs to be more visible, for sure, but not necessarily by sitting down with reporters or having more of a social media presence.

It’s best if a politician can be authentic, and Biden is very real and very convincing when he tries to call on our better angels. There’s a thirst for that, which helped him win the election, but he’s not doing a good job of reinforcing that message every day. If he ties it into every message he sends out, I think it will begin to get people back on his side.

He should go with what people like about him, which also happens to be his strongest asset and the Republicans’ biggest weakness.