NEW ORLEANS -- On a trip commemorating the seventh anniversary of the Obama administration’s $800 billion economic stimulus bill on Wednesday, Vice President Joe Biden offered a glimpse of what his not-to-be presidential campaign might have looked like.

Biden’s cheery message was that whatever some high-flying candidates might say, America does not need to be made great again, because it already has the most dynamic and fastest growing economy in the industrial world. But he also focused on two lingering problems, a shrinking middle class and crumbling infrastructure, as well as a common solution for both: more aggressive investment in public works projects like the ones the controversial stimulus package launched in February 2009.

On a kind of mini-whistle-stop tour to tout one of the administration’s most consequential and least popular initiatives, the most expensive one-shot blast of tax cuts and government spending in history, Biden painted a far rosier economic picture than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders have in their woe-is-America debates. After touring stimulus-funded projects at the Port of New Orleans and a rail yard outside Memphis, he told modest crowds of government and corporate officials along with hard-hat workers that the country is on the upswing. “We’ve gone from crisis to recovery, and we’re on the verge of resurgence,” Biden declared.

The only threat to U.S. dominance in the future, he said, was aging infrastructure that ranked only 27th in the world. But in his typically exuberant way, he reminded the crowd that the history of American success has been simple: “Build, build, build, build, build.”

“I’ve never been more optimistic about the country than I am today—and that’s not hyperbole!” Biden enthused. “We’re better positioned than we ever were to own the 21st century, if we can just get out of our own way.”

This may have been a standard-issue public-relations exercise on a policy anniversary, but it felt a bit like an alternate-universe version of a Biden campaign, the kind of upbeat, folksy, stay-the-course story the ultimate White House insider would have told about the last 7 years. While Clinton and Sanders have tried to balance high praise for President Obama with dark visions of a nation where the deck is stacked against ordinary families—and where persistent racism, sexism and homophobia rig the game as well—Biden mostly accentuated the positive. He rattled off familiar statistical evidence of America’s economic progress since the financial meltdown and the Great Recession: a record 71 straight months of employment growth that has produced 14 million new jobs, an unemployment rate that has declined from 10 percent to below 5 percent, a deficit that has shrunk by two thirds. He also argued that the Obama era has produced “fundamental change,” laying a foundation for a more globally competitive and environmentally sustainable economy.

For Biden, the most dramatic source of that change was the American Recovery Act and Reinvestment Act, the emergency rescue package of tax cuts and government spending that quickly became so unpopular that the word “stimulus” disappeared from the administration’s rhetoric—until yesterday. Biden, who oversaw the implementation of the Recovery Act for President Obama, proudly described it as “the largest economic stimulus in history, larger than the entire New Deal,” jump-starting the recovery in the U.S. faster than anywhere else. He noted that the European economy is still a mess, and blamed European leaders for choosing austerity rather than stimulus during the crisis.

“It’s not a dirty word, folks,” Biden said.

But the main thrust of Biden’s defense of the stimulus was that it was much more than a short-term fix. It was also stuffed with long-term investments designed to transform the country. For example, Biden accurately described it as “the most ambitious energy bill in history,” pumping an unheard-of $90 billion into renewable power, advanced biofuels, electric vehicles and other green stuff, helping to triple U.S. wind capacity and increase U.S. solar capacity more than 20-fold. It included Race to the Top, which Biden hailed as the most important education reforms in a generation. It poured $30 billion into health information technology, launching a transformation of American medicine from analog to digital; Biden pointed out that the big data collected through electronic health records will be crucial to the war on cancer that the president recently asked him to lead.

The stimulus was also crammed with infrastructure. It financed $48 billion worth of transportation projects, plus another $182 billion worth of state and local public works projects through an obscure program known as Build America Bonds, a kind of stimulus hidden in the stimulus. It also financed modern infrastructure, like high-speed broadband and a smarter electric grid. In New Orleans, Biden touted a $16.7 million stimulus grant that helped the port modernize an antiquated rail yard, upgrading its cargo capacity 1000 percent while shifting containers from gas-guzzling, highway-clogging trucks to freight trains. In Rossville, Tennessee, Biden highlighted how a $52.5 million stimulus grant for a new intermodal freight terminal helped persuade Norfolk Southern to proceed with a $2.5 billion project to ease freight traffic from the southeast all the way to New York City. And that terminal helped persuade companies to build 3 million square feet of new commercial space in the area, including a Volvo engine factory.

“A little outfit called Volvo decided this might not be a bad place to hang out,” Biden said. “Folks, this is the kind of stuff that generates economic growth.”

This is the kind of government spending that warms Biden’s heart, making the U.S. economy function better while providing middle-class jobs for workers in hard hats. He said that even “our Republican friends” who ridicule government in general say they support infrastructure, although he did take an oblique shot at former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal for turning down some stimulus money for broadband projects. Biden sees this stuff as “basic blocking and tackling,” and thinks America needs to do a lot more of it.

Biden’s overriding rationale for the stimulus, and for infrastructure generally, clearly would have been the overriding rationale for a Biden campaign: middle-class jobs. That’s what gets him passionate, the search for good-paying jobs for Americans who build intermodal terminals and unload container ships and service freight trains and manufacture engines. He likes to call himself Middle-Class Joe, and he specifically described what makes a job a middle-class job: “The kind of job where you can raise a family. Where you can own your own home. Where you can send your kid to a park and know they’ll come home safely. Where you can send your kid to a good high school, and if they do well you know you can afford to pay for college. Where you can take care of your parents in their geriatric years.”

Those kinds of jobs, Biden said, have been disappearing for decades, and the Obama recovery has not restored them. “The middle class has been absolutely crushed, folks,” Biden said. But unlike Sanders, who sees the squeezing of the middle class as the inevitable result of a corrupt campaign finance system dominated by special interests, or Clinton, who agrees that the system is rigged but also believes pervasive racism and other discrimination is dragging the American Dream away from ordinary families, Biden suggests that the answer to inequality is relatively simple: The government just needs to do more building. He said that manufacturers are already returning to the U.S., and far more will return if they have confidence that they can get their products to market efficiently.

“If we have 21st century infrastructure, we’ll own the 21st century,” he said.

The reaction of the pre-selected crowds of suit-and-tie officials and hard-hat workers was politely supportive but not wildly enthusiastic. They laughed at Biden's quip about how Amtrak ought to be renamed in his honor, and his story about how a group of LaGuardia Airport workers agreed with his complaint that LaGuardia Airport was a dump. But they didn’t seem too excited by his stay-the-course-but-build-more message. It’s a tough line to walk at a time when only one fourth of the public thinks the country is on the right track; it’s surely one reason, along with the death of his son Beau, that he decided not to run.

Still, as Sanders and Clinton struggle to balance their kind words for Obama, who is still popular with Democrats, with their gloomy diagnosis for America, which seems in line with the current public mood, Biden is offering a simpler approach. It's an alternative message for Democrats who want to embrace the progress of the Obama years without suggesting the progress has been adequate, and without twisting themselves into knots.

“The answer,” he said, “is to complete the job.”

Authors: