Leadership Quote by Joe Biden

This is stimulus-talk as reassurance, delivered in the plain, looping cadence of a politician trying to keep a fragile story from collapsing under its own timeline. Biden’s line isn’t built to persuade skeptics with numbers; it’s designed to manage expectations in the long hangover of the 2008 crash, when the Obama administration’s Recovery Act (ARRA) was being judged like a light switch: on or off, success or failure, now or never.

The repetition - “working… continue to work… not over” - functions as a rhetorical brace. It anticipates the most politically damaging critique of stimulus spending: that voters won’t feel it fast enough, and opponents will label it waste before projects hit the ground. So he stretches the horizon. “This summer” gives the public a near-term milestone, a narrative checkpoint meant to head off impatience. “Even after the summer” widens the window again, implicitly asking for patience without admitting delay.

The subtext is defensive: we know you’re angry, we know the unemployment numbers don’t look like “recovery,” but the machinery is moving. It also carries a quiet warning to the press and Congress: don’t call the verdict early. In 2009-2010, the administration was fighting a perception problem as much as an economic one; infrastructure spending, state aid, and tax credits arrive in uneven pulses. Biden frames that unevenness as momentum rather than lag.

It’s not poetic, but it’s strategic: keep the program’s legitimacy alive long enough for the real-world effects to become harder to dismiss.