Chuck Schumer got his progressives to swallow a bipartisan deal that tasted about as good to them as wilted spinach. Now he'll need to bring his leery moderates along for the whole meal.

The Senate majority leader is not known for putting a hard whip on his members, yet Schumer's willingness to dish tough truths to the likes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin — not to mention Bernie Sanders — amounts to his recipe for delivery on President Joe Biden's domestic agenda.

It started a few weeks ago, when Democrats’ strategy was in jeopardy. Progressives were hammering the bipartisan infrastructure framework as too meager, while moderates hemmed and hawed over forcing any of Biden’s priorities via party-line votes. The affable majority leader was in a jam.

Behind the scenes, Schumer began to nudge harder than his genial nature suggests. He recalled telling Sanders, the Senate Budget Committee chair and the firmest “no” vote on the bipartisan plan, that “if you want the moderates to vote with the progressive vision, you can't vote no on this. You don't have that luxury.” Then Schumer gathered Manchin and Sinema, his two most critical centrists, and told them of the caucus liberals: “If you won't vote yes on the budget resolution, I can't get them to vote yes” on the bipartisan bill.

The party's two wings "each need each other,” Schumer said in an interview, explaining his “two-track” legislative strategy to link it with a party-line spending bill. “The moderates couldn't pass a bipartisan bill without the more progressive wing of our caucus. And the progressives couldn't get a big, bold bill without the moderates.”

This week, with the slimmest possible Democratic majority and in the same 16-hour period, Schumer's two wings flew in unison. Sanders and other progressives voted for the bipartisan infrastructure plan, and moderates voted for a budget that sets up a $3.5 trillion spending bill. Then, almost immediately afterward, Manchin said he thought the price tag was too high.

It was a distillation of one of the trickiest balancing acts in Schumer’s career — something that the New York Democrat is getting used to while captaining a 50-50 Senate for longer than anyone in history. The truly hard work is still to come, Schumer acknowledged, reaching for a sports metaphor to explain his predicament: He said he was not spiking the football, likening his elated mood to catching a pass at midfield with 50 yards to go before the end zone. And he’s instructed his committees to meet regularly over the next month in order to write that $3.5 trillion bill by mid-September.