But what I keep coming back to is that Biden has struggled so much—and had to put so much of his personal prestige and political capital on the line—for a deal he can’t quite close with his own party. These are Democrats he is negotiating with. No Republicans—or Russians or Chinese, for that matter—were involved in the making of the deal, to the extent that there is a deal. And why, exactly, was it such a heavy lift that it took so long to get to the pretty inevitable top-line number? A month ago, the big breakthrough was the revelation that Manchin was for a $1.5-trillion bill and that Biden and the Democratic leadership wanted to get to approximately two trillion dollars. It did not take a negotiating genius to figure out that they were going to end up at $1.75 trillion. This is what practically broke Washington? You can’t blame that one on Donald Trump.

In 2020, Biden campaigned as a dealmaker—not a Trump, I-could-sell-you-the-Brooklyn-Bridge-type dealmaker, but an actual Washington-insider-who-can-make-this-town-work-again-type dealmaker. This is why the stakes for him now are so high. It’s become a basic test of his ability to deliver…

Biden, as I write this, is flying on Air Force One to Europe, on only his second trip abroad as President. He faces skeptical Europeans, who are still peeved about the messy American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and skeptical Chinese, with whom he must try to negotiate so that the cop26 climate-change gathering in Glasgow does not result in the abject failure many are predicting. But there is little doubt that Biden’s ability to lead in the world is directly tied to his ability to lead at home. Failure on one front is failure on both. So the question remains: “Are we going to vote and demonstrate that we can govern,” as Representative Elissa Slotkin put it, “or not?”