It may be an overstated political cliché that if you're explaining, you're losing. But you're almost certainly losing if you're explaining, ahead of time, why the economic boom you're expecting on your opponent's watch shouldn't be attributed to your opponent. One lesson of the volatility of the past dozen years is that fairly or not, the president's party tends to get the credit or blame for the economy-or at least for the way people perceive the economy. Biden is visiting swing states this week to sell American Rescue Plan's focus on giving Americans vaccines and money, but with economists across the ideological spectrum forecasting explosive growth, many veterans of the 2009 stimulus wars believe the economy will be all the sales pitch the bill needs.
Democrats seemed to have learned a bunch of lessons from the backlash against the Obama stimulus-that it's important to sell your own product, that it's even more important not to trash your own product, and that it's supremely important to make sure your product works as well as possible. Even though the Obama White House pushed for the biggest possible stimulus it could get out of a bailout-weary Congress in 2009, most economists believe the $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act would have produced a stronger recovery if it had been even bigger. Biden was determined to make sure his relief act didn't undershoot as well, even if that meant he would face criticism for ignoring the budget deficit and failing to attract Republican votes.
So far, though, political history is not repeating itself. The approval rating for Obama's recovery plan dropped more than 20 points from his election until he signed it into law three months later, even though Obama himself remained quite popular at the time. By contrast, the Biden stimulus is polling in the 70s, while Biden himself is polling in the fifties. If the pandemic ends and the economy roars, as independent forecasters like J.P. Morgan are predicting, the rescue plan could get even more popular, and the strategy of No could get even more difficult.
There were also consequential political differences between the past and the present. Obama had to push for stimulus after Congress had already bailed out the Wall Street banks that sparked the crisis in 2008, which, Pfeiffer quips, was like asking for money today after Congress had already given a trillion dollars to Covid itself. By contrast, Biden had the luxury of seeking relief after Congress had passed several popular bipartisan relief bills in 2020. Most importantly, Obama needed to round up 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster, including the three Republicans and half a dozen fiscally conservative Democrats who refused to spend more than $800 billion. Biden engineered his bill to pass through a budget process called reconciliation, so he only needed only the 50 Democrats in the Senate.

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