This is a rare occasion for celebration, and Joe Biden, faced with bad polls, will certainly not let it pass: the president must sign Monday, with great fanfare, a gigantic infrastructure plan.
This law, passed with difficulty by Congress about ten days ago, devotes 1.2 trillion dollars to the renovation or construction of bridges, roads, terminals for electric cars, water pipes.
It should also make it possible to develop public transport and high-speed Internet.
All of this, according to Joe Biden, will put America in a position to “win the competition” against China – the American president and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping will also have, on Monday evening (Washington time), a virtual meeting.
If the enactment of a law is still a fairly solemn affair, the Democratic president wanted a ceremony more imposing than usual on Monday, in the gardens of the White House, at 3 p.m.
He wishes to highlight the elected officials who worked on his law, and to celebrate a text that has gone beyond partisan divisions, which have been exacerbated since the mandate of Donald Trump.
The latter also castigated the 13 elected Republicans who voted in favor of the text in the House of Representatives.
One of his followers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, even called them “traitors”, and circulated the phone numbers of their offices.
It will therefore be particularly interesting on Monday to see which Republican tenors, if any, will respond to Joe Biden’s invitation.
Survey
While the president’s plans are popular with Americans, his confidence rating has steadily declined since the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan this summer.
The latest opinion poll from Washington post and the ABC channel, published Sunday, established the confidence rating of the American president at 41%.
Only 39% of Americans approve of its economic policies, and 70% of them consider the economic situation in the United States to be bad.
If the world’s leading economic power has left with a bang, it is also experiencing a surge in inflation and supply problems, while the White House has not, as it promised itself, completely turned the page on the pandemic.
What weigh on the daily life of this middle class to which Joe Biden continues to promise better days.
This growing unpopularity worries the Democratic camp, one year away from legislative elections which could cause it to lose its fragile parliamentary majority.
The surge in prices also complicates another great project of the American president: 1,750 billion dollars in social spending and aid for the energy transition, which must be examined this week by the House of Representatives, then be voted on by the Senate.
This will require convincing in particular a refractory, Democratic Senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin. The latter is worried about too much profligacy from the White House, which according to him would only fuel deficits and inflation.
The signing of the infrastructure law on Monday will therefore be less an end point than the start of a vast White House communication offensive.
This week, Joe Biden will be doing the after-sales service of this text, and the promotion of the one that remains to be bragged about, in the state of New Hampshire (Tuesday) and in the large industrial city of Detroit (Wednesday).