Biden Kicks Off Sales Tour to Salvage Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal

President Biden opened a combination road show and apology tour centered on his bipartisan infrastructure deal on Tuesday in La Crosse, Wis., as he sought to reassure Republicans that he was committed to the agreement he struck last week and convince liberal and centrist Democrats that the compromise had not dimmed his economic ambitions.

Mr. Biden praised the $579 billion bipartisan pact, promising it would bring faster internet, less traffic and safer drinking water to Americans in Wisconsin and across the country. In many cases, he promised the same or at least similar benefits that he predicted when rolling out his more ambitious $4 trillion plan earlier this year.

The president portrayed the compromise as the largest federal infrastructure effort since President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed legislation creating the interstate highway system 65 years ago. “This is a generational investment — generational investment — to modernize our infrastructure,” Mr. Biden said, “creating millions of good-paying jobs.”

But in the same speech, the president also said he would continue to press the case for trillions of dollars in additional spending to reshape the economy, educate children and young adults, support workers and families, and fight climate change. And he reiterated his plans to pay for that spending by raising taxes on corporations and high earners. Such a plan would almost certainly need to be passed with only Democratic votes.

“There’s much more to do, and I’m going to continue to fight for you,” Mr. Biden said during a stop at a municipal transit facility. “I’m going to keep working with Congress to pass even more of my economic agenda so we can keep building an economy from the bottom up and middle out.”

The stop, which took place in a swing congressional district held by a moderate Democrat and where broadband internet access remains spotty for many residents, represented a reset of sorts for a president who nearly fumbled his delicate balancing act on infrastructure before it could begin in earnest.

The setting brought reminders of the tricky political landscape Mr. Biden is trying to navigate to pass that deal into law: The lectern where the president spoke was flanked by a digital sign, the kind usually used to warn motorists of upcoming road work, that showed the words “American Jobs Plan” — the name of the $2.3 trillion infrastructure initiative that Mr. Biden was forced to pare back significantly in the name of bipartisan consensus.

Mr. Biden announced the deal with Republicans on Thursday after weeks of negotiations. A few hours later he told reporters that he would not sign the agreement if it was not accompanied by a second, partisan bill containing much of the rest of Mr. Biden’s $4 trillion economic agenda. That comment angered Republicans and Democrats who had negotiated the bipartisan deal, and it prompted a frantic weekend for the White House as some Republicans questioned whether the deal could survive.

On Saturday, Mr. Biden released a statement saying he had not meant to imply that he would veto the bipartisan agreement, promising to campaign aggressively for its passage. That worried progressives who are counting on the second, partisan bill’s passage through the process known as budget reconciliation, which bypasses a Senate filibuster.

White House officials have spent recent days seeking to reassure progressives and centrist lawmakers, as well as outside groups that have pushed for all or part of Mr. Biden’s sprawling economic agenda.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Air Force One on Tuesday that Mr. Biden’s aides had in recent days held calls with more than 60 Democratic and Republican lawmakers, chiefs of staff and staff directors, across the House and the Senate. Senior White House staff members met on Tuesday with four Democrats and four Republicans in the House Problem Solvers Caucus, a centrist group, and administration officials also held talks with the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Ms. Psaki said White House staff members addressed more than 100 progressive groups in a call organized by the group Build Back Together.

“We have every senior member of the White House working to communicate directly with the public, with groups, with members of Congress about the components of this package and our continued commitment to also get the reconciliation package across the finish line,” Ms. Psaki said.

In Wisconsin, Mr. Biden sought to reassure everyone involved, in different ways.

His starting point in each case was to highlight the components of the bipartisan deal, casting it as a job creator that would help urban, rural and suburban Americans alike. “This bipartisan breakthrough is a great deal for the American people,” Mr. Biden said, predicting the agreement would produce jobs that did not require a college degree. “This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America.”

He said the deal would improve the quality of life for Wisconsin residents, including through more deployment of broadband internet in rural areas, where the White House says about 35 percent of families lack reliable internet.

Mr. Biden said the $65 billion to expand broadband access in the deal would be enough to make high-speed internet available to “every American home.” Independent experts say the money is unlikely to stretch that far. Mr. Biden’s proposed American Jobs Plan would have allocated $100 billion to fully complete the process of extending broadband to every home.

Mr. Biden also promised the bill would replace the nearly 80,000 water service lines in Milwaukee that are made of lead, along with every other lead water pipe in America. He cast spending on road and bridge repairs as a means to reduce traffic for drivers across the country, which he said amounted to a $1,000 annual loss for the average American because of wasted time. White House officials did not offer details of how much of that “traffic tax” the deal would alleviate.

But in a nod to anxious progressives, Mr. Biden made clear that the deal alone would not begin to cover his full economic priorities, including those laid out in his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which is focused on what administration officials call “human infrastructure”: education, child care, paid leave and tax credits to fight poverty, among other initiatives.

Mr. Biden singled out the plan’s extension of an expanded child tax credit, which he said “will significantly benefit working folks.” He also detailed several of his plans to raise taxes on businesses and high earners in order to offset the cost of his spending plans, like an increased corporate income tax and a new minimum tax on big companies like Amazon that currently pay little or no federal income tax — even though Republicans have vowed to block those tax increases.

The president acknowledged that tension, then in the next breath praised the parties for coming together on the agreement struck last week.

“There will be more disagreements to resolve, more compromises to forge along the way,” he said, “but today the American people can be proud that Democrats and Republicans — families here in Wisconsin can be proud, Congress can be proud, because this country came together, forged a bipartisan deal.”