While some even within the administration see the West Wing trying to put a rosy spin on a President who wasn’t doing much, aides who were most deeply involved point to calibrated, multi-dimension, simultaneous strategies often overlooked by those focused only on Biden jawboning his way through Oval Office meetings.

There was making sure Buttigieg held back in those Sunday show interviews. There was deploying Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo for intense national security briefings about China on the Hill to push through the CHIPS and Science Act. There was the group of aides who huddled by the sofa in the Roosevelt Room about how to feed an echo chamber of prominent liberals blasting Senate Republicans for initially refusing to pass the veterans burn pits health bill out of anger at the reconciliation deal — and then get the tweets they helped generate in front of wavering Democrats to convince them to give up their objections for the sake of helping mess with Republicans.

And there was the quiet coordination with Manchin and Schumer as Biden held off declaring the climate emergency that many activists and Democratic officials were demanding, though they knew that would once again mean the President getting raked on social media by his own supporters. Though several options were prepared for how to declare a climate emergency, Biden aides say that gamble captures their approach: As disappointed as many of Biden’s supporters were in the moment, passing a law produced a much bigger result that can’t just be rescinded by a future president.

What came together “was not an overnight thing,” the adviser said. Biden “plays the long game and really does have the ability to look ahead and know you’re going to go through the rocky periods to get there.”