Amy Walter, The Cook Political Report:
Well, it’s certainly a win. You take them where you can get them. And it is also a bipartisan win, both in the Senate and the House.
So now the president can go out and members of the Democratic Party can go out in 2022 and say, we worked in a bipartisan manner, as we had promised you, to pass things that matter.
The challenge, though, is while the president and while the energy secretary come on and say we’re going to sell this to the public, the sausage-making is not quite done yet. They’re still trying to do the Build Back Better bill. That’s going to have a back-and-forth between the Senate and the House. That’s probably going to go on. Tam and I have talked about this for a while, probably December.
Most Capitol Hill reporters are talking about, like, spending Christmas and new years covering this. So there’s still a ways for it to go.
The other big piece — and you raised this with the secretary — is, OK, how much immediate help is this going to provide to Americans who right now — and this is just a CNN poll — 40 percent of them saying, I don’t think the administration is addressing the most pressing problems — or they do think they’re addressing the most pressing problems; 60 percent say, I don’t think they’re addressing the most pressing problems in the country right now.
For the White House and for congressional Democrats in 2022, those numbers have to be reversed. Voters have to see that this administration is focused on the things that they see as the biggest problems.