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President Joe Biden on Monday will kick off another administration-wide road show touting his economic agenda — a three-week counterpoint to the messaging coming out of the intensifying Republican presidential race.
Dubbed the “Invest in America” tour, the event series will reprise a similar 60-stop, 30-state barnstorming effort by Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Cabinet officials this spring, which they used to highlight how the president’s legislative victories in Washington were benefiting specific communities through new infrastructure projects, business expansions or funding announcements.
The first tour served as a ramp-up to the president’s announcement he would seek a second term. Now, the second tour comes after weeks consumed by debt ceiling negotiations and the second indictment and arraignment of his predecessor. Biden has only held one political event in the interim.
This tour, which will run through July 15, kicks off at the same time as a two-week congressional recess. The White House says it will partner with House and Senate Democrats on many of the stops to “highlight how the President’s Investing in America agenda is creating jobs and opportunity in every corner of the country” — and how Republicans have worked to undo some of its key components.
Biden will make multiple stops as part of the tour, a White House official says, but he’ll launch it Monday from the White House with a “major infrastructure announcement.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will travel through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee in an electric vehicle to promote a public-private collaboration to boost the clean energy sector. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg will announce new funding from the infrastructure law at a stop on the tour, too, while Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra tours Ohio, Michigan and New York to discuss lower health care costs.
Those are among the 20 states the second round of the Invest in America tour will hit, the White House says, also including Iowa and New Hampshire.
Biden is also scheduled to visit Chicago next week for a major economic address. As he seeks a second term, the president is arguing that “Bidenomics,” as he called it at Saturday’s union rally, has reversed four decades of trickle-down economic policies that hollowed out the middle class.
“Under my plan, under Bidenomics, we’re creating jobs at home and exporting products abroad,” he said.