President Joe Biden notched a long-awaited legislative win, relying on House Republicans to pass his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal after a handful of disgruntled liberal Democrats withheld their votes in protest.
But with polling indicating that the $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending bill has not helped Democrats connect with the electorate, and Biden’s recent missteps before the press, the White House is preparing to send the president, an inconsistent messenger, on an infrastructure deal sales tour.
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Biden’s sales pitch has been muddied by the infrastructure deal’s bipartisan nature and Democratic squabbling, according to Republican strategist Brian Johnson.
“If you’re supportive of this infrastructure package, then you should be thanking Republicans for delivering this victory,” he said. “It was House Republicans who kept this from being defeated by House Democrats, who would not get in line behind Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”
“The lack of coordination and ability of the House to move and act on things in any kind of a cohesive manner with the White House is what the American people have seen,” he added. “If I’m a congressional Democrat, I’m very worried about the midterms because I have failed to deliver on any campaign promises.”
Biden’s political wattage has also been dimmed by his lackluster popularity and economic management, Johnson told the Washington Examiner. Biden’s average job approval rating is 42.8%, and his disapproval rating is 51.7%, according to RealClearPolitics.
“If the president can stay on message and really message this as a bipartisan victory, then there may be some use there,” he said. “I think it’s hard to justify massive additional spending in the middle of an inflationary period where you have major supply chain crises impacting folks’ holidays.”
But Biden has been at odds with his administration on at least three occasions during the last 10 days, exacerbating a Republican-pushed perception of his wobbly leadership.
Biden, for one, stopped short of apologizing to French President Emmanuel Macron for the botched rollout of his new national security alliance with the United Kingdom and Australia but conceded the announcement had been “clumsy.”
“It was not done with a lot of grace,” he said before the sideline G-7 meeting in Rome. “I was under the impression that France had been informed long before that the deal was not going through. I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”
Climate envoy John Kerry had previously described Biden as “literally not aware of what had transpired.”
Then days later, when Biden was departing his post-summit press conference, he gave reporters a “thumbs up” to signal that centrist Democrats Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona had endorsed the revised social welfare and climate framework he unveiled the morning he left for Europe.
“As the president said during the press conference, he is confident we are going to get this done, and the thumbs up was simply a visual restatement of that,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre emailed reporters.
Manchin demanded the following day that the Congressional Budget Office score Biden’s estimated $1.75 trillion social and climate framework before lawmakers consider it, suggesting the president and his staff were playing “shell games” with their projections.
And Biden, upon his return to the United States last week, dismissed a report that his administration was negotiating up to $450,000 settlements with migrant families separated under President Donald Trump as “garbage.”
“The number is what I was referring to,” he clarified after a weekend event. “If in fact, because of the outrageous behavior of the last administration, you were coming across the border, whether it was legal or illegal, and you lost your child … it’s gone — you deserve some kind of compensation, no matter what the circumstance.”
Biden has not scheduled the infrastructure deal signing, saying on the weekend he hoped Republicans would attend. But with less than a year before the 2022 midterm elections, the president, too, foreshadowed it could be “two to three months” until voters “see the effects of the bill.”
Biden embarked on a coronavirus legislation sales tour in March, but it was overshadowed by a surge in migrants across the southern border and his anti-gun executive orders. Biden told House Democrats at the time that the tour was important because former President Barack Obama did not take a “victory lap” for the 2009 economic bailout measure, and Democrats were “shellacked” during the 2010 midterm cycle. Polling has already captured a disconnect between the coronavirus legislation and the general public, more respondents attributing Biden’s enhanced child tax credits to Congress rather than the president.
Jean Pierre, Biden’s principal deputy press secretary, did not preview the president’s infrastructure deal sales tour this week as congressional Democrats brace for more bickering over his social and climate framework. But she did confirm Biden would team up with Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking officials to promote the bills.
“We are confident that our policies will improve the lives of nearly every American, and grow our economy, and create jobs,” she told reporters during her Monday briefing. “That’s our focus.”
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All but six House Democrats joined 13 Republicans in passing the infrastructure deal late last Friday. The Democratic defections were over Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s decision not to hold a simultaneous vote on the social and climate framework.
“It’s going to be a tough fight,” Biden said after a Monday event. “It ain’t over yet, as they say, as the old expression goes. But I feel good, and I think people are realizing … it’s important to get it done.”
