President Joe Biden safeguarded his signature legislative achievements from getting the ax during the debt ceiling negotiations.
Now his team is reorienting its internal operations to get more of that salvaged money out the door and reap voter appreciation for it.
Inside the White House, a team of senior officials led by deputy chief of staff Natalie Quillian has been charged with leading the acceleration of thousands more investments in the bridge repairs, railroad upgrades and clean energy initiatives that the White House believes will drive job growth and, ultimately, provide an antidote to Biden’s stagnant approval ratings.
That’s just one component of the push. Cabinet departments are also under orders to speed implementation of key social and economic policies passed under last year’s huge climate, health care and tax law. And the White House plans to deploy top officials across the U.S. to highlight construction improvements and new manufacturing projects in red and blue states alike, punctuated by a two-week blitz at the end of June that the administration has dubbed its “Investing in America” tour.
Biden will likely ramp up his own travel as well, aides said, resuming a more regular cadence after spending the last month largely consumed by the debt limit talks.
“These massive investments that we have bipartisan buy-in on are actually transforming the economy — and we have the receipts,” said Mitch Landrieu, the senior adviser charged with coordinating implementation of the infrastructure law, summing up the administration’s message. “This is the mission of his presidency: to rebuild America.”
The renewed campaign to sell the nation on Biden’s economic vision is, to a degree, a classic early-election season attempt to boost the president’s standing — one that will give him more visibility in states key to his reelection campaign. The president is slated to visit North Carolina on Friday, where he’ll tout his accomplishments in a battleground that his team believes he can win in 2024. The trip will be Biden’s first since signing the debt ceiling deal that averted default and kept his major manufacturing, infrastructure and climate laws intact.
But it’s also an implicit recognition that the White House has lagged on the salesmanship side of its legislative pushes. Having come into office pledging not to repeat the missteps of the Obama years — when the White House’s reluctance to more loudly brag about its various legislative wins allowed its critics to fill the void and shape public opinion — Biden’s team now finds itself trying to make up ground.
“Democrats have this age-old problem of, we pass something, then move immediately to the next thing we need to pass and manufacture some sort of crisis to show the world is about to go to hell,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. “That’s 63 years of life experience speaking right there.”
White House officials vow that won’t happen this time around. The two-year debt ceiling deal cleared the decks earlier than anticipated, they said, leaving ample time to implement and sell their agenda before the 2024 presidential campaign hits full stride — and eliminating, at least for now, any major distractions.
Biden himself has expressed eagerness to claim credit for calming partisan tensions and steering the country out of the pandemic and into what his administration sees as a roaring recovery, even as Republicans frequently lay blame for rampant inflation at his feet. Less clear is whether, after fighting for two years to pass a sprawling domestic agenda, he can get voters to recognize the impact of those achievements.
“It’s the $2 trillion question, if you think about all the resources moving through IRA and CHIPS and IIJA and the word salad of acronyms that not a single voter in America understands,” said Patrick Gaspard, president of Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, referring to the major bills Biden signed in his first two years of office. “There’s going to be a need to move away from stats, move away from the dollar size of investment and to lift up very specific stories in places where programs have already started to land.”
White House allies and aides hope the coming campaign will more closely associate Biden with any economic gains voters are already seeing in their communities, as well as draw a contrast with the Republican presidential field.
During the 2020 campaign, Biden cast himself as a steadying figure focused on the nuts and bolts of governing, one who could pull the country out of the chaos of the Donald Trump era. With Trump as the GOP frontrunner once again, allies and aides argue the only difference is that Biden has a concrete record to prove that point.
“Part of telling the story is reminding folks what things looked like before we got there,” Landrieu said. “That’s why the president says to me and everyone else: ‘Keep your head down, keep your shoulder to the wheel, do the work, the vision is right, the proof in the pudding is right, just keep doing that and the rest will take care of itself. But hurry the hell up.’”
The fresh emphasis on Biden’s past victories is also an acknowledgment of the tough political realities facing his administration now. The White House has little shot of getting more major legislation through a divided Congress, meaning Biden will be forced to cast aside much of the rest of his agenda.
Polling shows voters remain sour on the state of the economy as inflation holds steady, despite record job creation numbers and an unemployment rate hovering near 50-year lows. And while many of Biden’s individual policies are popular, there’s pervasive concern within the party that too few people give the president credit for shepherding them into law.
“Sometimes the easy part here is the product, and the hard part is the packaging, and that’s a skill set that not many in Congress have, or in the White House,” said Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.). “I don’t have the answer, but it’s going to be probably the make-or-break [issue] relative to the next election.”
Biden aides said they plan to take a multi-pronged approach to force the concrete changes — driven by the administration’s slate of legislative victories — into the public’s consciousness.
Earlier this week, the White House promoted a website detailing the size and location of the $479 billion in private-sector projects spurred by provisions in the infrastructure, manufacturing and climate-focused laws. The hope, officials said, is that the easy availability of the data will spur a wave of stories from community and regional media outlets detailing the local impact of Biden’s achievements.
“We don’t expect Americans to remember the name of every big bill that’s been passed,” said Ben LaBolt, the White House’s communications director. “What is important for them to know are the signature pieces of those bills.”
