Democrats will triumph as Covid bill passes – but the work has just begun

The House of Representatives will pass the final $1.9 trillion Covid relief package today, nearly two months after Joe Biden and the Democratic majorities in Congress began their long fight to get it done.

The heavy lifting hasn’t even begun.

It’s one thing to negotiate ideas and policy proposals for weeks and put those ideas on paper. It’s a whole different ball game to execute that policy at the administrative level – to efficiently dole out and tap into trillions of dollars across the entire federal bureaucracy.

On top of that, Democrats face the daunting task of winning over the hearts and minds of Americans who have been desperate for help amid a coronavirus pandemic that has upended their economic situation as well as their social lives.

From the president and speaker Nancy Pelosi all the way down to the lowliest congressional backbenchers, the party has agreed on how it plans to accomplish that: shameless self-promotion.

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“Over the next few weeks and months, we must take every opportunity we get to explain exactly how the American rescue plan will work for the American people,” Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer wrote to his colleagues on Tuesday.

Exhorting his fellow Democrats to join him on a publicity campaign for the landmark pandemic relief legislation, he urged them to seize every opportunity to tout the bill’s many “people-focused provisions”: $1,400 stimulus checks for more than eight of every 10 American households, an extension into the summer of the Covid-era federal unemployment benefits programme, the broadened child tax credit, and several other top-line measures.

“We cannot be shy in telling the American people how this historic legislation directly helps them,” the Senate Democratic leader wrote.

Biden is on board with this strategy. On a conference call with House Democrats last week, the president explained how the Obama administration paid a political price for being too humble after signing into law the nearly $1 trillion stimulus package in 2009 to try to climb out of the Great Recession.

“We didn’t adequately explain what we had done,” Biden lamented on the call. “Barack was so modest. I kept saying, ‘Tell people what we did.’ He said, ‘We don’t have time. I’m not going to take a victory lap.’ And we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.”

All this is to say, Biden may be signing his so-called American rescue plan into law in the coming days – but don’t expect Democrats to let us forget about it.

This victory lap will last all the way through the 2022 midterm elections.