POLL: Trump finally dipping to high thirties: Biden 46, Trump 38.

GE Thread: Trump's ratings still tanking. Monmouth University Poll.

43% approve (44% in April)
51% disapprove (49%)

Trump’s response to #COVID19 outbreak:
42% good job (46% in April / 50% in March)
51% bad job (49% / 45%)https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_050520/ …

Biden Camp Finds Selling Point in Ailing Economy: His Work on 2009 Recovery

Joe Biden had just been sworn in as vice president. All he needed now was a job.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had assured Biden that he would be consulted on every major decision. But many on the new president’s team were still Biden-skeptical, and Obama was not sure the meandering former senator had the discipline to be an effective governing partner, people close to both men said.

So, during a private lunch in February 2009, Biden slid a memo across the table to 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 Obama, barely glancing at the memo, according to two people familiar with the exchange.

Obama was already pivoting to health care reform, so why not encharge Biden? As it turned out, 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 a pandemic, economic collapse and a far-larger relief package, Biden’s campaign is hoping to leverage his stewardship of the 2009 stimulus as a point of contrast with President Donald 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, 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 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 Biden aced it, his longtime lieutenant, Ron Klain, said in an interview.

But the stimulus says more about the kind of vice president Biden was than about the kind of president he would be. While he became the expediter-in-chief and offered Obama advice and tactical suggestions, he made none of the major strategic calls about the size and composition of the program, aides said. Nor did he seriously push Obama — as he is now pressuring Trump — to fight for a bigger funding package, even though former officials said he conceded the stimulus was probably too small.

There was nothing ambiguous, though, about the impact of the stimulus on Biden’s political fortunes.

“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 Obama’s transportation secretary.