By ALEXANDRA JAFFE, Associated Press
REHOBOTH BEACH, Del. (AP) — 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 himself later acknowledged that he had failed to sell Americans on the benefits of the legislation.
His biggest mistake, Obama 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.”
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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.
The president called it a “a once-in-a-generation investment” to tackle a range of challenges — crumbling roads and bridges, gaps in access to affordable internet, water tainted by lead pipes, homes and cities ill-prepared to cope with increasingly frequent extreme weather…
