With his boos President Obama working the healthcare program that would come to have his name on it?
Vice President Joe Biden was give the job of helping oversee the hundreds of billions that where involved in righting a economy that has gone south at the time, after George Bush left office…
Biden’s people want Americans to know this as a avenue that will important in the months coming with a hurt US Economy to be fixed….
….during a private lunch in February 2009, Mr. Biden slid a memo across the table to Mr. Obama, outlining a role to erase those doubts: quarterbacking the implementation of the $787 billion economic stimulus that had been rammed through Congress a few days earlier in the depths of recession.
“Sounds good to me,” said Mr. Obama, barely glancing at the memo, according to two people familiar with the exchange.
Mr. Obama was already pivoting to health care reform, so why not encharge Mr. Biden? As it turned out, Mr. Biden’s work on the rollout, implementation, oversight and selling of the 2009 stimulus — officially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — was the most sustained, and perhaps the most significant, assignment of his time in office.
Eleven years later, in an election season defined by pandemic, economic collapse and a far-larger relief package, Mr. Biden’s campaign is hoping to leverage his stewardship of the 2009 stimulus as a point of contrast with President Trump — whose White House is pushing back at congressional oversight of $2.7 trillion in new spending even as a host of problems has emerged, especially chaos in the small-business loan program.
“The central question of this election will be who can dig us out of a historic economic hole, so his leadership of the recovery act should be his core résumé selling point,” said David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s top political adviser and a Biden surrogate.
An examination of that critical two-year period, drawn from interviews with 30 people involved in the effort, offers a glimpse of Mr. Biden’s strengths as a manager — his enthusiasm, focus on detail and knack for leading a first-rate team that moved the money out quickly and minimized waste and fraud. It was “one big competence test,” and Mr. Biden aced it, his longtime lieutenant, Ron Klain, said in an interview….
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“It sort of made him, to be honest, in the eyes of the Obama people,” said Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman who served as Mr. Obama’s transportation secretary.
Mr. Obama picked Mr. Biden, in part, because he viewed him as a past-tense presidential aspirant. Yet if overseeing the stimulus proved Mr. Biden was a team player, his pursuit of the assignment — and he wanted it badly — was also a sign that he had never entirely abandoned his own political ambitions. In the end, the stimulus catalyzed his emergence as Mr. Obama’s trusted partner and, eventually, set him up as a presidential contender.
Mr. Biden mentioned the stimulus only in passing on the 2020 trail, when there was a trail, and has only recently begun invoking it as a campaign theme. There is broad agreement that the program had a positive impact on an economy in free fall, with the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluding that it created between two million and 4.8 million full-time jobs….
Note…
From the above linked NY Times piece….
But Mr. Trump has not embraced oversight as Mr. Obama did, nor has he deployed Vice President Mike Pence in the Biden watchdog role, leaving the task to various administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
This is not lost on Mr. Biden. Just as Mr. Trump signed the first coronavirus bill, an aide called to inform Mr. Biden that the president planned to resist crucial congressional oversight provisions on constitutional grounds.
Mr. Biden, already annoyed at having to campaign from his basement in Delaware, exploded: “What a joke! You’ve got to be kidding me!” he shouted, inserting expletives, according to two people who talked with him.