President Joe Biden has been wrestling for weeks with whether to reappoint the current chair of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, or replace him with Lael Brainard, a Democrat and economist who has served on the Fed board since 2014. The process has resembled a tortured morass of indecision. Forever the senator, Biden has engaged in an extended debate, soliciting opinions and facts far and wide as he looks to fill a vital post at a time of deep economic uncertainty and political peril.

The deliberativeness around naming the next Fed chair has been a feature, not a bug, of Biden’s presidency. The president can at times be famously stubborn once his mind is made up — he was, for instance, committed for years to ending the war in Afghanistan and stood steadfast even in the tumultuous days of this summer’s withdrawal. But in other instances, much to the dismay of some aides, his decision-making can seem endless, creating a vacuum quickly filled by Beltway guessing games and runaway narratives.

Biden’s approach, honed over a 36-year career in the “world’s greatest deliberative body,” can cut both ways. His defenders believe that the commitment to conversation and consensus allowed competing factions time to reach an agreement that led to the eventual adoption of the bipartisan infrastructure deal this past week. But his critics are convinced that the delays allowed the dominant storyline to be the bitter, sluggish pace of negotiations and not the real-world benefits of a transformative $1.2 trillion bill, with $550 billion in new spending.