Indeed, the story of how a longtime legislator, who had never run anything larger than a Senate committee staff, managed to marshal a government-wide campaign may offer a preview of how a President Biden would approach the coronavirus pandemic, and the global economic contraction it has already spawned. Paradoxically, though, it’s a story that’s hard for the presumptive Democratic nominee to share with voters at the moment, because he, like so many Americans, is stuck at home.

Read: The long arc of Joe Biden

“What I found was you have to manage it every single day,” Biden said during a recent CNN town hall, after he was asked what his experience handling the recovery had taught him about the qualities needed in a president in times of crisis. “And so it’s about management. It’s about day to day to day. And I give you my word that for the better part of that 18 months, I was literally on the phone at least three to four hours a day with my team, talking about the detailed implementation. How do we get the money? What do we do? Who do we go to? Who do we ask for?”

To the degree that there was criticism of Biden’s management of the Recovery Act—and there was some—it mirrored the current critique of the former vice president’s pragmatic brand of politics. Critics on the left faulted him and Obama for not making the stimulus package bigger (though keeping it below $1 trillion was the price of winning necessary Republican votes for its passage in the Senate). Republicans attacked the administration for defaulting to Democratic priorities and not working harder to win GOP support.

“The stimulus represented the original sin of the Obama administration to congressional Republicans,” said Michael Steel, who was then a senior aide to the House Republican leader, John Boehner. “It set the tone for the next eight years. House Republicans would have been pretty cheap dates—and it wouldn’t have taken that much to get a fair number of moderates on board—if the White House had reached out more.”

The Democratic viewpoint is precisely the opposite. For Biden and the Obama White House, the House GOP’s lockstep opposition to the plan—before Obama even made his first trip to Capitol Hill to press for it—was what set the tone for the next eight years. In this version of the story, Biden’s successful lobbying of three Senate Republicans—Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—made possible the passage of any program at all.

“We needed three Republican votes, and he went and he got the three Republican votes,” recalled Ron Klain, then Biden’s chief of staff and now a campaign adviser. “People say, ‘It was a different time, and he couldn’t do that again.’ But a lot of people said he couldn’t do it back in 2009.”

In January of that year, the month Obama took office, the country lost some 800,000 jobs, as unemployment edged toward 8 percent. That capped the worst three months of jobs numbers since defense factories ceased operating at the end of World War II. The stimulus that Obama proposed was a mix of tax cuts, tax credits for business, aid to state and local governments, an expansion of food stamps, and a raft of infrastructure programs.