Biden Takes Case to Voters After Passage of Major Infrastructure Bill

(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden and his party notched a huge economic victory late Friday with passage of a bipartisan public works bill. Now he seeks to sell Americans on the merits of $550 billion in new spending even as they face rising prices for fuel, food and housing.

The president plans an infrastructure tour over the next several weeks to promote the legislation, including a visit to the Port of Baltimore on Wednesday. While ports have been the focus of supply-chain logjams, Biden also faces immediate pressure this week to decide how to address a surge in gasoline prices.

Officials will be looking to new energy price data on Tuesday as a guidepost while weighing a release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as foreign oil producers such as Saudi Arabia put Biden in a bind.     

Instead, the president can now point to the promise of years of infrastructure investment at home. Cabinet secretaries will fan out in the media blitz, one White House official said, traveling all over the country -- to both red and blue states -- and making local and national TV appearances to explain the bill’s benefits. 

Biden and his administration intend to redouble efforts they’ve undertaken since March to communicate his economic plans and what they’ll mean for the American people, the official said.

Cognizant of the Obama administration’s failure to fully explain the benefits of its 2009 stimulus package and the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the president and his top aides want to avoid those missteps. They want Americans to understand how the infrastructure package -- with money for roads and bridges, ports and airports, drinking water, broadband access and electric charging stations across the country -- will improve their lives ahead of the 2022 midterms, which at the moment look likely to cost Democrats control of Congress. 

Much of the argument to convince voters to keep Democrats in power will revolve around the president’s efforts to heal the economy and curb the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Americans “are in a show-me-don’t-tell-me mode,” White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. 

“We are going to show them in the weeks and months ahead that we have made this progress on Covid. We have made this progress on the economy. We are past, now, the infrastructure bill,” he said. “We can start to get going on implementing that. I think that will pay off results.”

Biden is also considering a response to the highest gasoline prices for U.S. motorists since 2014, after the OPEC+ group snubbed his call for faster increases in crude output. Saudi Arabia added to the potential pain by jacking up crude prices last week.

Sour Mood

Despite a successful coronavirus vaccination campaign, significant reductions in joblessness, an expanding economy and a surging stock market, polls show that most Americans think the country’s on the wrong track. Critics say that’s in part because Biden and his White House have been too timid about claiming credit for economic gains -- particularly in comparison to his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Republicans have sought to amplify that negative sentiment, hammering Biden on inflation, supply-chain troubles and labor shortages. As a result, just 35% of Americans consider the national economy good, while 65% call it poor, according to a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 

That’s a 10-point fall from September, when 45% of Americans called the economy good. Meanwhile, the average U.S. gasoline price rose to $3.42 per gallon of regular fuel from $2.12 a year earlier.

Democrats suffered stunning setbacks in state elections last week, with Republican Glenn Youngkin defeating Biden friend Terry McAuliffe for governor of Virginia and a much narrower than expected victory for incumbent New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, another Biden ally. The president of New Jersey’s state senate lost to a Republican who had never run for public office and spent little on his race.

Murphy said the election results show that Democrats aren’t doing enough to resonate with voters. They should focus on visible economic issues, including raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure and early childhood education, he said.

“There are a lot of kitchen tables we need to connect more deeply with,” he said on “Meet the Press.”

The country’s sour mood is a major challenge for Biden, even if data suggest Americans’ outlook should be sunnier. 

The economy added 531,000 jobs in October, beating economists’ expectations and cutting the joblessness rate to 4.6%, while hourly wages grew 4.9% on average -- the most since February.

Many Americans are receiving an expanded child tax credit under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan passed in March, adding to household income. 

Yet voters’ perceptions of the economy appear to be colored by the persistence of the pandemic, which is still killing more than 1,000 Americans a day, stubborn inflation and supply-chain logjams that are causing shortages and delays for consumer goods, including some foodstuffs and holiday gifts.

“Americans are tired of how long it’s taken to get the economy moving, to get Covid under control,” Klain said on “Meet the Press.” “I feel the frustration personally myself. I think everyone does. And I think that frustration wears on people.”

Democratic Infighting

Adding to the pessimism is the president’s struggle to pass the second part of his economic agenda, a package of tax increases and social-welfare measures called “Build Back Better.” A handful of progressive Democrats in the House voted against the infrastructure bill because centrists in their party are still haggling to reduce the size and scope of the larger Build Back Better legislation, the liberals’ top priority.

The tricky economic moment only amps up pressure on the White House to sell Americans on its roads-and-bridges bill, the largest single federal investment in decades in U.S. infrastructure. 

Congress has authorized more than $2 trillion in fresh spending since March between the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure package, and the Biden White House and Democrats now must show Americans that the extra spending will improve their lives, not just add to mounting national debt. 

“They’ll see the effects of the bill -- this bill -- probably starting within the next two to three months,” the president told reporters on Saturday, before adding that the spending will help boost the economy and create union jobs for workers without college degrees. The legislation, he said, will “have a profound impact over time.”

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