US president Joe Biden is facing a familiar challenge as he promotes his new one trillion dollar (£740 billion) infrastructure deal to the American people and tries to get the money out the door quickly for maximum impact.
The Obama administration faced criticism that its giant stimulus bill in 2009 was too slow to work its way into the sluggish economy.
Barack Obama himself later acknowledged that he had failed to sell Americans on the benefits of the legislation.
With that in mind, the Biden White House is planning an aggressive sales campaign for the infrastructure bill.
Mr Obama said his biggest mistake 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”.
Mr Biden began his own effort to fashion such a story when he took a victory lap after his infrastructure bill cleared US congress, notching a hard-fought win on a 1.2 trillion dollar 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, and homes and cities ill-prepared to cope with increasingly frequent extreme weather conditions.
Coming at the end of a particularly difficult week in which his party suffered surprise losses up and down the ballot in local elections, passage of the legislation was a respite from a challenging few months for an embattled president whose poll numbers have dropped as Americans remain frustrated with the coronavirus pandemic and an uneven economic recovery.
But the legislative win sets up a series of challenges for Mr Biden, both in promoting the new deal and at the same time continuing to push for a 1.85 trillion-dollar (£1.37 trillion) social safety net and climate bill, which would dramatically expand health, family and climate change programmes.
The stakes for Mr Biden are clear in his sagging poll numbers.
Priorities USA, a Democratic big money group, warned in a memo this past week that “voters are frustrated, sceptical, and tired – of Covid, of economic hardship, of school closings, of higher prices and stagnant wages, of unaffordable prescription drugs and health care and more”.
“Without results (and effectively communicating those results), voters will punish the party in power,” chairman Guy Cecil said.
While polls broadly suggest Americans support the infrastructure package, some indicate the nation is still not certain what it contains.
About half of adults surveyed in a Pew Research Centre poll conducted in September said they favour the infrastructure bill, but a little over a quarter said they were not sure about it.
In an effort to correct past messaging mistakes, the White House is planning an aggressive sales campaign for the infrastructure bill, with Mr Biden planning trips across the US to speak about the impacts of the legislation.
He will visit a port in Baltimore on Wednesday and promises a signing ceremony for the infrastructure bill when legislators are back in town.
The administration is also deploying the heads of the Transportation, Energy, Interior and Commerce departments, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency administrator and top White House aides to speak about the bill on national and local media and African American and Spanish-language press.
They are also putting out explainers across the departments’ digital platforms to help Americans better understand what is in the bill.
But White House officials will also have to ensure the money gets spent. It is a challenge which Mr Biden is intimately familiar with, having overseen the implementation of the 2009 stimulus as vice president.
Then, despite promises to prioritise “shovel-ready projects,” challenges with permitting and other issues led to delays, prompting Mr Obama to joke in 2011 that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected”.
Democrats felt at the time that the party did not do enough to remind Americans how they had improved their lives, and ultimately allowed Republicans to frame the election conversation around government over-reach.
The next year, Democrats faced massive losses in the mid-term elections, losing control of the House and a handful of seats in the senate.
Mr Biden, for his part, insisted on Saturday that Americans could start to see the effects of the infrastructure bill in as little as two to three months.
Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg made the rounds promising that some projects are just waiting for funding, but others, like investments in new electric vehicle chargers and efforts to reconnect communities divided by highways, will take longer.
In contrast to the 2009 stimulus, Mr Buttigieg told NPR, Mr Biden’s infrastructure bill is “about both the short-term and the long-term”.
“There will be work immediately, and for years to come,” he said.
Mr Biden will still have to contend with ongoing tinkering on the other big item on his agenda — the social spending bill.
Unlike the infrastructure bill, which passed with the support of 19 Republicans in the senate, the social spending package is facing unified opposition, which means Mr Biden will need every Democratic vote in the senate to get it across the finish line.
With the party’s moderate and progressive factions squabbling over the details of the final bill, and two centrist holdouts – senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona – opposed to many key progressive priorities, winning final passage of the second part of his agenda may be a much tougher puzzle to solve.
