Infrastructure victory creates fresh challenges
WASHINGTON — He has been here before.
President Joe Biden doesn’t need to look any further back than his time as vice president to grasp the challenges that lie ahead in promoting his new $1 trillion infrastructure deal to the American people and getting the money out the door fast enough that they can feel a real impact.
When President Barack Obama pushed through a giant stimulus bill in 2009, his administration faced criticism that the money was too slow to work its way into the sluggish economy, and Obama later acknowledged that he had failed to sell Americans on the benefits of the legislation.
Obama’s biggest mistake, he said in 2012, was thinking that the job of the presidency was “just about getting the policy right” rather than telling “a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose.”
Biden began his own effort to fashion such a story when he took a victory lap Saturday after his infrastructure bill cleared the Congress, notching a hard-fought win on a $1.2 trillion piece of legislation that he says will tangibly improve Americans’ lives in the months and years to come.
Coming at the end of a particularly difficult week in which his party suffered surprise losses up and down the ballot in elections nationwide, passage of the legislation was a respite from a challenging few months for an embattled president whose poll numbers have dropped as Americans remain frustrated with the coronavirus pandemic and an uneven economic recovery.
But the legislative win sets up a series of challenges for
Biden, both in promoting the new deal and at the same time continuing to push for a long-argued-over $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate bill, which would dramatically expand health, family and climate change programs.
The stakes for Biden are clear in his sagging poll numbers.
Priorities USA, a Democratic big money group, warned in a memo this past week that “voters are frustrated, skeptical, and tired — of COVID, of economic hardship, of school closings, of higher prices and stagnant wages, of unaffordable prescription drugs and health care and more
In an effort to correct past messaging mistakes, the White House is planning an aggressive sales campaign for the infrastructure bill, with Biden planning trips across the U.S. to speak about the impacts of the legislation.