The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In Rose Garden event, Biden touts aid deal, plans to visit 2 states
President Joe Biden celebrated the $1.9 trillion COVID-19 aid package with Democratic lawmakers Friday in his first Rose Garden event as president.
The White House has plotted an ambitious campaign to showcase the law’s contents while looking to build momentum for future, more difficult parts of the president’s sweeping agenda. Biden will travel to the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Georgia next week to talk it up, and other top administration officials will fan out around the country to do likewise.
West Wing aides say there is a determination to avoid the mistakes of more than a decade earlier, when President Barack Obama’s administration didn’t do enough to promote its own economic recovery plan. But Biden gets a measure of credit for the successful implementation of the plan itself, according to veterans of the Obama administration.
Biden wound up with oversight of the government’s mammoth $787 billion stimulus plan after he wrote Obama a memo about how it should be run, and he savored his role as the program’s top cop. He said he had not “yet” looked to his vice president, Kamala Harris, to play the same role on COVID19 aid.
Biden is expected to appoint someone to oversee implementation of the COVID-19 relief plan. And while Biden himself will not be as in-the-weeds this time as he was in 2009, aides still expect to get plenty of questions from him about exactly where and when the money is moving.
There are challenges that lie ahead for Biden, although White House aides point to polling that shows the package is popular with Republican voters even though not a single GOP lawmaker voted for it. No Republicans attended the Rose Garden victory lap.
“Less than two months into his presidency, and Biden is showing he never truly meant his promises of bipartisanship and unity,” said GOP Chairwoman Ronna Mcdaniel. “Instead of working on meaningfully targeted relief legislation with Republicans, he chose a hyperpartisan bill full of pork.”
The Obama bill faced headwinds because it followed the bailout of the banks, engineered under President George W. Bush, and came as the economy remained stagnant. Economic forecasts project a robust recovery by year’s end, which would make this stimulus an easier sell.