Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Thursday night to engage in what is currently her full-time job: walking the line between the reality that multiple federal prosecutors have said or implied that Donald Trump has committed crimes and the reality that a majority of voters do not support the idea of impeaching him. On Kimmel, Pelosi rolled out what I believe is a new talking point on the subject:

I’m done with him, in terms of talking about him. What we want to talk about is, let’s build the infrastructure of America and not have him stomp out of the room.

Now, in my opinion, it is important for the speaker of the House to be concerned about whether the president is a criminal, and it is far-fetched to imagine that a congressional leader could be “done” talking about any POTUS, let alone one who is Donald Trump. But let’s stipulate that Pelosi is completely right, and what regular heartland Joes and Janes really want to hear about right now is what the Democratic Party is going to do to improve their day-to-day lives vis-à-vis infrastructure. What do Nancy Pelosi and the other House Democrats have to offer those voters?

Well, I looked into it! What the Democrats have to offer is this—a plan to restore roads and bridges, expand broadband, renovate ports and airports and schools, and increase renewable energy production. It doesn’t seem like a terrible plan, and infrastructure spending tends to poll well. So far, so good.

But what are they doing to sell that plan? Not much! A Better Deal to Rebuild America was released in February 2018, and it’s only two pages long. It doesn’t have its own website or catchphrase or Green New Deal–style branding. (It’s part of the larger A Better Deal package that Dems launched for the midterms, but the midterms happened seven months ago.) It isn’t being advertised on social media with promotional videos or interactive gadgets like the savings calculators Sen. Elizabeth Warren is using to raise awareness of her student debt and child care proposals. It isn’t being marketed via a media campaign—by, let’s say, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Conor Lamb making morning-show appearances as a duo to emphasize that the Democrats’ plan is the kind of practical proposal that can unite urban leftists and rural moderates. Democrats aren’t holding individual town halls where voters in their districts can talk about local projects that need funding and learn how passing a bill would help them or people they know find jobs that provide good wages and benefits(TM).

Infrastructure has turned into a D.C. joke word—a throwaway signal of being dutiful and lowering expectations, which is how Pelosi used it Thursday. What’s perverse about this is that a big public works program to restore roads and schools and airports could, in fact, be both practically useful and symbolically uplifting, the kind of thing that potential Democratic voters could rally around—you know, like they did with the actual New Deal!

The Pelosi-Schumer “mainstream” axis of the Democratic Party likes to think of itself as following in the popular tradition of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. And it’s true that Clinton and Obama weren’t as far left as some figures in the party today. But they didn’t get elected by telling voters what couldn’t be done. They didn’t turn their ideas, like brokering peace in Northern Ireland and massively expanding health coverage, into practice by releasing two-page position papers and holding sad press conferences in the Capitol basement to complain that Republicans weren’t acting in bipartisan good faith. They got things done by, you know, selling tens of millions of voters on the idea of joining a visionary renewal of American life and government, then orchestrating yearslong efforts to institute their policies and guarantee their legacies. They talked about their ideas—however “centrist” they may have been—as if inviting the public to be part of creating something important and ambitious, not as a defensive means of changing the subject.