Tamara Keith and Amy Walter on the infrastructure package, fundraising in the GOP

Tamara Keith:

I think what is notable about the bipartisan group that came by the White House today is that it is similar to what the Biden administration did to try to build bipartisan support or a bipartisan coalition for the big COVID-19 relief bill.

They reached outside of Washington to mayors and governors to be able to say, hey, especially from mayors, we have got bipartisan support. There’s a joke about mayors — or that mayors tell about themselves, that there’s no Democratic or Republican potholes. There’s just potholes. And when you’re mayor, you just have to deal with those things.

And the members of Congress who came over to the White House were either former mayors or former governors. Now, whether they’re actually going to get them to sign on, particularly the Republicans, is an open question.

But someone like a Senator Mitt Romney came and he said that he felt that President Biden was open to discussing, and President Biden expressed this himself when the reporters were in the room, that he was open to discussing not just what is in the package, but also how to pay for it.

We’re in this period — and it is a long period of time — between when the Biden administration announced their plan and the sort of informal deadline they have set for Congress to figure out whether it could possibly be bipartisan and what shape it’s going to take.

And so, every day, every few days, they are doing another event to show that they are working on it, to keep it in the public eye, to try to win over public and popular support, so that they can claim, like they did with the COVID relief bill, that it is bipartisan, even if it isn’t supported by Republicans in Washington.