The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era

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The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era

4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 · rating details · 309 ratings · 74 reviews

In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how t...more In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network.

Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.(less)

Hardcover, 432 pages

Published August 14th 2012 by Simon & Schuster

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Mar 22, 2013 Will Byrnes rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american-history, economics, non-fiction

I’m pretty tired of this depression we’ve been having. Unemployment that hit 12% in 2009 and kept rising, states from ocean to ocean laying off tens, hundreds of thousands of public employees each. No more auto industry, and vast swaths of the Midwest losing jobs and industrial capacity faster than Mitt Romney changes policy positions. And things have not been looking up either. The federal government is investing nothing in alternate energy R&D, leaving such things to private enterprise, an...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Aaron Arnold rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: economics, politics, history, favorites, read-in-2012, science

This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, an act so vast that not even its supporters fully appreciate the range and depth of its impact. The economics that prompted the bill's passage remain controversial in the political world, as do its contents, but Grunwald's evenhanded and fairly comprehensive reporting wo...more This is probably the best book I've ever read about a single bill. Grunwald does a magnificent job recounting the genesis, drafting, passage, and effects of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the stimulus, an act so vast that not even its supporters fully appreciate the range and depth of its impact. The economics that prompted the bill's passage remain controversial in the political world, as do its contents, but Grunwald's evenhanded and fairly comprehensive reporting work should be essential for anyone who wants to have an informed opinion on the stimulus, and even to some extent "government spending" in general.

The ARRA, one of President Obama's signature laws, was first proposed before he was even elected as both an extension of previous stimulus efforts and as the fulfillment of many of his campaign promises in the sectors of energy, health, education, and the economy. The economic reasoning behind the stimulus is important to understand, because members of the Republican Party, as recounted here, have had a "complicated" relationship with fiscal stimulus. According to mainstream economic theory, in a recession that features reduced business and consumer spending, it's a bad idea to either raise taxes or cut government spending, because that removes additional money from businesses and consumers, which only exacerbates the recession. By the same principle, it's a good idea to cut taxes and/or raise government spending to try to fill up the missing output gap, until businesses and consumers spend normally again, whereupon government spending and taxation can return to a more sustainable path. You would be able to judge the success or failure of this strategy either by seeing soaring interest rates on government debt, if the policy was too aggressive, or prolonged recession, if policy was too timid. These were Keynes' insights on fiscal policy during the Great Depression, and they've remained basically conceptually intact ever since; the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 were in part promoted as perfectly Keynesian stimulus in response to the recession at the start of his term, and although there were questions about the proper distribution of the tax cuts, both Republicans and Democrats alike agreed that cutting taxes and raising spending, or at least not cutting spending, were the appropriate responses.

The recession that began in late 2007 and really began to get bad towards the end of the 2008 Presidential campaign was even larger, and in the minds of both parties deserved a commensurately larger response, along with more active monetary policy. And to that end, the ARRA was designed, primarily by Democrats but also with Republican input, as a mix of tax cuts and increased spending which should have been acceptable in theory to Congressmen regardless of party affiliation. On the tax side, there were billions in credits for children, earned income, student loans, homebuying (important in a recession precipitated by the bursting of the housing bubble), energy use, energy use, and more. There was also the typical annual forgoing of scheduled adjustments made to the Alternative Minimum Tax as well as completely new cuts in the payroll tax, with the reasoning that increasing people's take-home pay was one of the most effective methods of stimulus. In an unfortunate preview of the bad press the stimulus would receive, that large payroll tax cut was specifically designed using insights from behavioral economics, which suggested that if people didn't realize they were getting a tax cut they would be less likely to hoard, as opposed to the Bush strategy of simply sending a check. This was satirized as "sending flowers to a romantic interest without signing the note", and indeed it would turn out that many people were under the impression that the stimulus included no tax cuts at all.

On the spending side, one big area was aid to state governments, who were hit by massive decreases in tax review and, lacking the ability to deficit-spend, were forced to make large cuts in essential services. Beyond that, there were big expansions of Social Security payment and unemployment insurance, which were important in a crisis involving hundreds of thousands of net job losses per month as well as extremely effective ways to keep money circulating in the economy. Finally, there were a dizzying array of spending initiatives that were either campaign promises or requests from Senators and Governors: over $150 billion for health care, preserving Medicaid and encouraging much-needed improvements in medical IT. Over $100 billion for education, in aid to local governments to keep schools from shuttering, increases in Pell Grants, and in Race to the Top education reform. Over $100 billion in infrastructure, from highway/bridge repair to new high-speed rail initiatives to environmental cleanup to constructing new buildings to improving America's patchy, embarrassing access to broadband. Over $25 billion to energy, providing funds for weatherization, efficiency improvements, and smart grids, as well as seed money to start several entirely new renewable energy businesses with immense future potential (these sections, with Energy Secretary Steven Chu leading the way, are some of the best in the book). Almost $10 billion for science, with grants for NASA, NIST, NOAA, the NSF, the DOE, and more. The book covers such a dizzying array of potentially transformational projects in the stimulus, including plentiful profiles of stimulus-aid businesses, that it could almost be subtitled The Quiet Revolution. In constant dollars it was 50% larger than the whole New Deal, and it was condensed in one single bill instead of being spread throughout years.

And yet, this bill passed with 0 House Republicans and only 3 Senate Republicans, ceaselessly denounced in conservative circles as a big-spending, waste-filled assault on freedom and a handout to Democratic interest groups. It's worthwhile to consider their objections. First of all, the purest, most classic examples of fiscal stimulus are "timely, targeted, and temporary" - narrow measures designed to address specific aspects of a recession very quickly and then fade away. The stimulus, however, also included plenty of measures that were "speedy, substantial, and sustained" - things like Race to the Top that, whatever their merits, were not really stimulus measures in the classical sense. Where were the Works Progress Administrations projects, the new Hoover Dams and Skyline Drives, the armies of newly employed workers? Secondly, the stimulus was so large that it seemed inevitable that there would be large amounts of waste and fraud; a nation which had just seen Bridge to Nowhere scandals should expect similar follies on a vastly grander scale. Third, the impact on the deficit could be so large as to seriously impair the credibility of the US dollar as a safe store of value, and these objections were being raised not only by Republicans but also by many Democrats, even some in the White House. Fourth, for all Obama and the Democratic Party's proclamations of bipartisanship, this was a bill that would fulfill liberal priorities and reward Democratic-leaning interest groups, what was the upside for a Republican who voted for a bill that would protect groups like public employee unions?

I won't mince words: as Grunwald shows, these objections are basically horseshit, either cynical, hypocritical, or both. First, the stimulus came of age in an era where it's simply not possible to put massive armies of unemployed people to work making new Jones Beaches or Interstate Highway Systems. Labor-saving technologies mean more work can be done with fewer people, and the increased complexities of building mean that even "shovel-ready" projects can take time to get off the ground, and it definitely doesn't help when states like Florida or New Jersey cancel some of the biggest infrastructure projects like new rail tunnels or high-speed rail lines for purely political reasons. Second, the oversight provisions in the stimulus, including websites like recovery.gov that provided unprecedented transparency into specific projects and initiatives, meant that a vanishingly small amount of waste or fraud was uncovered, even using the most uncharitable definitions of waste or fraud conceivable. Third, not only has the stimulus' impact on the deficit been dwarfed by such items as the Bush tax cuts, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the aftermath of the recession itself, but since the stimulus has passed interest rates on US public debt have fallen to the point where they are actually negative in real terms - investors are literally paying the Treasury money to hold public debt, even as Republicans demand higher deficits through yet more high-end tax cuts. Fourth, it's worth mentioning that the Republican Party had suffered an immense rout in the 2008 elections and remains unpopular even today. But even despite that, Republicans had incredible amounts of input into the bill, Senators like Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and Arlen Specter in particular had almost carte blanche to arbitrarily insert or remove line-items in exchange for their vote. Their statements and actions - e.g. Rep. Paul Ryan's public denouncements of the stimulus yet quiet letters requesting more funds for his district - give the lie to the idea that they had any kind of principled objections to it.

However unfairly, the stimulus seems unlikely to go down in memory as being as transformative as the original New Deal. Part of that is rose-colored glasses, as the New Deal was neither so highly-thought of by contemporaries or as unified a set of policies as it currently seems to us. Part is due to PR missteps by the White House, such as the infamous 8% unemployment projection, part is due to relentless partisan attacks and the new conservative system of epistemic closure, part is also due to particularly bad media failures, and part is due to the nature of the Recovery Act itself. So much of its infrastructure funding was spent on projects that didn't have the iconic stature of, say, LaGuardia Airport, but were badly needed nonetheless; Grunwald gives the distinction as "The New Deal had the world's largest dam. The stimulus had one of the world's largest dam removal projects", and there's another perfect example of the changed mentality later on:

"Millions of fans watched Stanford defeat Virginia Tech in the 2011 Orange Bowl, but none of them knew that an aging transformer almost overloaded while feeding power to the stadium.... The problem was detected by Florida Power & Light's new smart grid equipment, which quickly diverted the electricity to healthier transformers, avoiding a midgame blackout."

It's hard for people to think in terms of counterfactuals; "think of how much worse it could have been" never got anyone elected. Yet without the stimulus the US would be a poorer and less advanced country, and many businesses that are only just beginning to realize their potential would have been strangled in their cribs by a recession that didn't obey the laws of partisan combat.

No one will argue that the stimulus was perfect: it wasn't large enough, it wasn't the political slam-dunk it should have been, some companies it funded like Solyndra and A123 have failed, unemployment remains high years after its passage, and there are plenty of arguments to be had about projects that it should have covered. But it was unquestionably bold and creative, and it will continue to help the economy immensely, years into the future, especially now that Obama has been reelected and the prospect of another period of Republican doldrums has been (mostly) averted. As Grunwald closes with: "We know if it worked. We just don't know if it matters."(less)

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Dec 04, 2012 Michael rated it 5 of 5 stars

“Without cocaine monkeys, there's no tax cuts and no roads.”

Lone anecdotes cannot begin to explain how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law in 2009, but coked up primates comes as close as any.

But let’s back up.

If you reside in a state of existence where you do not believe in facts, this is not the book for you. The New New Deal is hilariously, painstakingly nuanced, and Mike Grunwald goes to great lengths to lay it all out. Why the economy was unraveling. What Obama’s economic...more “Without cocaine monkeys, there's no tax cuts and no roads.”

Lone anecdotes cannot begin to explain how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act became law in 2009, but coked up primates comes as close as any.

But let’s back up.

If you reside in a state of existence where you do not believe in facts, this is not the book for you. The New New Deal is hilariously, painstakingly nuanced, and Mike Grunwald goes to great lengths to lay it all out. Why the economy was unraveling. What Obama’s economic advisers told the president-elect in December 2008. How Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor concocted the "insurgency” strategy to take back Congress. And perhaps most importantly, what the heck did we get for $787 billion?

It’s a fun story. In many ways, it doesn’t feel real. It’s the true story of how Barack Obama’s stimulus bill is transforming the American economy. Education, clean energy, healthcare, and transportation revolutions are still taking place across the country thanks to the stimulus. Oh, and it saved the country from another Great Depression.

The failure of most economics reporting is often the failure of economic policymaking: both are subject to substantial revision. Grunwald’s New New Deal is a worthy first contribution toward understanding the politics and policy behind this momentous, albeit misunderstood, single piece of legislation that changed the country in ways we still cannot comprehend. In fact, Grunwald succeeds where the Obama Administration so often failed: communicating why this is important to the American public.

If you put aside everything you think you know about Barack Obama’s failed economy, The New New Deal will help the reader understand how Barack Obama accomplished more in one bill than most presidents accomplish in eight years, all while facing unprecedented Congressional obstruction.

Which brings me back to the monkeys.

President Obama arrived in Washington wanting to change the way Washington does business. Grunwald’s account of Mitch McConnell’s strategy to make every aspect of the Obama agenda appear “controversial” rather than “bipartisan” is the key passage toward understanding the legislative realities of the Obama presidency. Almost instantly, Obama was forced to horse trade to pass a bill to save the economy from depression. He traded then-Republican Senator Arlen Specter $10 billion for scientific research at the NIH for his support.

Eventually, some of that NIH money ended up a monkey’s nose in a lab in Bethesda. That might not end up being groundbreaking research, but the economy got the tax cuts and the roads. In the end, Obama would never change Washington, but his Recovery Act would change the country.
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Nov 26, 2012 Toni rated it 5 of 5 stars

One reviewer called this "A tale that reads like a book-length episode of The West Wing," which pretty much sums it up.

Love this guy's writing. A sampling, from one 3-page span:

"It was hard to imagine a more complex legal and technical issue with higher financial stakes [than the information superhighway], raising thorny questions about natural monopolies, wireless spectrum, network neutrality, and the inalienable right of all Americans to download stupid cat videos."

On the drafting of the gree...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Mary rated it 4 of 5 stars

Who would've guessed that a book about the much-maligned "stimulus plan" of 2009 would be not only a compelling and witty read but also the best book-length defense of Obama's first-term accomplishments I've read? It certainly surprised me. I did pick up the book expecting that Grunwald would be fundamentally sympathetic to the cause and to Keynesian policies in general, though he proves more than willing to call out Obama and his advisors for their naivete, their missteps, and their utter failu...more

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Nov 01, 2012 Lori rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: politics

apparently obama's stimulus plan was a huge success, maybe the most successful government plan ever, and no one even knew it. tons of jobs were created, tons of projects happened that never would have happened without it, many people who would have been out of work were kept on or rehired because of it, and no one knew it because republicans convinced us it was a failure. there was very little abuse of funds but republicans lied and said there was and the evil press bought it. i guess the bottom...more

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Oct 13, 2012 Phil rated it 5 of 5 stars

Michael Grunwald is a young journalist with Time magazine. The New New Deal is a justification of the Obama Administrations 787 billion dollar stimulus. This is a book of factual presentation of the politics behind the Stimulus amd the implementation and the various technologies the stimulus has helped to underwrite. Some of the energy technologies were new to me. The stories about High Speed (Bullet) train development in the US are something I was not aware of, other than our own high speed tra...more

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Sep 20, 2012 Zack Ward rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Zack by: Internet

It is unfortunate that The New New Deal is perhaps the only book on the market that offers a positive review of Obama's Recovery Act. It would make this book seem less biased if the narrative that preceded it hadn't been so negative.

Anyway, my impressions were positive overall. Grunwald goes to great lengths to explore the debate from both sides of the political aisle starting just a little before Obama's election in 2008 and ending in March of 2012. He sat in several meetings on Capital Hill wi...more It is unfortunate that The New New Deal is perhaps the only book on the market that offers a positive review of Obama's Recovery Act. It would make this book seem less biased if the narrative that preceded it hadn't been so negative.

Anyway, my impressions were positive overall. Grunwald goes to great lengths to explore the debate from both sides of the political aisle starting just a little before Obama's election in 2008 and ending in March of 2012. He sat in several meetings on Capital Hill with members of congress, the senate, and the white house during this time, and a majority of his assertions are supported by documented interviews. So, I buy almost all of what he has to say.

SO what does he have to say? His thesis is that the Recovery act was a very progressive piece of legislation that worked much more effectively than the media gives it credit for. The $787 billion bill financed investments in renewable power, such as solar, wind, and non-photosynthetic biofuels, it advanced energy efficiency, the lithium ion battery, smarter electrical grids, green manufactring, and energy efficient retrofits of commercial and government buildings that have already saved millions of dollars in operating costs. It has advanced the health IT system towards electronic medical records (as opposed to the chicken scratch pen and paper ways of the past) and its funds incentivized Race to the Top has proven already to be the most effective federal policy in Education the US has ever seen (based on International + College exams). It expanded infrastructure projects at airports, train stations, and roads. It expanded antipoverty measures to make sure that the poor pay their rents and don't end up on the street, where they will eventually end up costing the government more money in unpaid ER bills. It also expanded broadband internet access to rural areas, so they can stay better connected to readily available information. AND it gave the middle class the biggest tax cuts in history (though they did it in a surreptitious manner, that is not in a check form, so that Americans would be more willing to spend their higher salary earnings as studies have shown that when people are given money gifts, they tend to save). Perhaps my favorite part of the bill was the formation of ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy); a moonshot research initiative designed to fund research focusing on alternative means of generating energy. There have already been some promising results; the marines are using algae-powered submarines and boats as we speak that power themselves for months without re-algaefying.

But the book is more than a wikipedia article on the Recovery Act. It chronicles the political climate at every step of the way. How republicans had been happy to pass the bill in late 2008/early 2009, as it had been basic Keynesian economics: when the private sector implodes, generate demand by funding public works that put people to work, and relieve the recession pains with tax cuts/credits for the middle class. A few months later, the tea part emerged and galvanized the party towards ideological extremes, causing republican centrists to get "scozzafava'ed" or replaced by tea party candidates that pledged to be inflexible on every issue. And from there, well, the job of implementing the later stages of the Recovery Act got trickier.

Needless to say, The New, New Deal is a good read. It is a little heavy on the capital hill political jargon, which I didn't like, but I think by doing so TNND conveys the story in a "as it happened" kind of way. I would recommend this book to anyone curious about what was actually done by the Obama administration, or to anyone that wants to know how the important legislative talks went down. (less)

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Apr 09, 2013 Kay rated it 3 of 5 stars

I definitely learned some things and this book really achieved the goal of retelling extremely recent events in a way that makes you think about them ever so slightly differently. I think Grunwald is a great reporter and a good writer -- if he weren't, a book about the bureaucratic successes of the economic stimulus package known as the Recovery and Reinvestment Act would be much more difficult to digest.

He does a good job of addressing the limitations of what made the stimulus less effective t...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Ben rated it 3 of 5 stars

In many ways a perfect example of something that would have worked better as maybe two or three articles or Kindle singles than it does as a book. The beginning part discussing the behind-the-scenes creation of the stimulus is probably the most interesting and previously unreported part of the book.

But hearing how Jason Furman and others put together the package is only about 50 to 60 pages. And unfortunately, a lot of the rest suffers. The part on political wrangling on the Hill doesn't feel l...more

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Sep 16, 2012 Sharon Pelletier rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book knocked my socks off. Grunwald has the knack of making complex and somewhat dry details of law-writing, economic theory, and political maneuvering both lucid and fascinating. He slips into a slightly snarky tone at points, and it's clear where his political sympathies lie, but I did not find that he misrepresents facts or skews the logic of his argument to suggest an untruthful explanation. And he has the research and sources to back his writing. Being somewhat of an ostrich about curr...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Robert J. rated it 2 of 5 stars

It's kind of like the Obama administration. You really want to like it, but the more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't get there. The main thesis of the book is that the Obama administration is underrated and that the stimulus act in the first term is actually a glorious new deal for sustainable energy and infrastructure. The trouble is, the facts are not on his side, so the author simply ignores them. Before reading this book, read The Escape Artists by Noam Schieber and Predator...more It's kind of like the Obama administration. You really want to like it, but the more you learn, the more you realize it just doesn't get there. The main thesis of the book is that the Obama administration is underrated and that the stimulus act in the first term is actually a glorious new deal for sustainable energy and infrastructure. The trouble is, the facts are not on his side, so the author simply ignores them. Before reading this book, read The Escape Artists by Noam Schieber and Predator Nation by Charles Ferguson. You will then understand, while trying to read this one, what he's left out. A case in point: who decided how much stimulus. He hypes Larry Summers for "pushing" for a larger stimulus--$800B instead of the more modest $300B that the non-economists in the room (Rahm et al.) thought could be done--while simply ignoring the fact that C. Romer was convinced it should have been more like $1.3T (as in trillion) and that Larry Summers cut her off at the knees by suppressing it because he didn't believe Congress would go for it, probably wrongly. She was right, and here we are four years later with ALL of those guys gone from the administration. ALL. (Oh no, excuse me, Lew is still there as Treasury secretary, it will be interesting to see what happens.) As for the glorious new deal, I can't believe the author is seriously proposing that the inadequate and poorly administered subsidies to sustainable fuels (can you say "corn-based ethanol" and "Solyndra") are effective. Cars still get 25mpg and coal is still king and Obama is still seriously considering the Keystone pipeline. Where are the measures and facts in this book? Also, it's clear the author could have used an economist as co-author--at least, the total absence of any explanation of economic principles and consequences, or evidence of an understanding of fiscal policy, finance, or monetary policy, should give anyone pause before giving any serious credence to his thesis. There's probably a case to be made for the Obama administration (I voted for him twice), but this book doesn't make it well.(less)

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Jan 04, 2013 Christopher rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fareed-zakaria-gps-book-of-the-week, favorites, politics

One of the definitions I have for a great book, psrticularly a non-fiction or current affairs book like this, is that it pierces through the haze of my own preconceived notions and reveals something in a new, startling, and unbiased way. This book is definitely one of those books. Mr. Grunwald has written a book that will rewrite the narrative on the Recovery Act, Pres. Obama's $800 billion stimulus that was passed in his first 100 days in office. While partisans on both sides of the political d...more One of the definitions I have for a great book, psrticularly a non-fiction or current affairs book like this, is that it pierces through the haze of my own preconceived notions and reveals something in a new, startling, and unbiased way. This book is definitely one of those books. Mr. Grunwald has written a book that will rewrite the narrative on the Recovery Act, Pres. Obama's $800 billion stimulus that was passed in his first 100 days in office. While partisans on both sides of the political divide have been quick to criticize the stimulus for its percieved failures, Mr. Grunwald shows how it is actually transforming, even revolutionizing, the American economy by dragging some industries, like algae biofuels, out of the lab and into the marketplace and giving some projects, like high-speed rail and solar energy, a real chance at success when four years earlier they were just pipe dreams. At the same time, Mr. Grunwald chronicles the genesis of the Recovery Act in the midst of the 2008 campaign and the financial crash, the sausage-making legislative fight that got it through Congress in 2009, and how the Republican party had already decided to oppose Pres. Obama on, literally, everything just days after he had taken the oath of office. It continues the historical narative into the recent past showing how the White House and Congressional Democrats failed to create an effective message about the stimulus's success and how that led to the Tea Party-led Republican resurgence in 2010 and how it was helping the economy between 2009-2011 with so little fraud as to be unbelievable for government work. Also, one of the great things about this book is how funny Mr. Grunwald is. One online review I've read compared it to a real-life episode of "The West Wing" and Mr. Grunwald's snarks at both parties bears that assesment out quite well. I will say his sarcasm borders on vitriolic at times, but he spreads it around rather than just piling it on the Republicans. And if I got a nickel for every time he started off a sentence or a paragraph with the word "Anyway" I would be a rich man. Still, I always knew that the stimulus had kept us out of an economic depression, but Mr. Grunwald successfully argues in this book that the Recovery Act is even bigger than FDR's fabled New Deal. The writing is superb, the research is thorough, and the criticism is distinctly non-partisan. I highly recommend this book to all of my friends on either side of the political aisle. (less)

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Sep 26, 2012 Neil McGarry rated it 4 of 5 stars

Anyone who thinks the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act didn't do the nation any good has evidently not read this book. In "The New New Deal" Grunwald takes an in-depth look at the much-maligned 2009 stimulus package, which very likely kept the Great Recession from turning into the second Great Depression. Happily, it also paved the way for a number of liberal policy goals, like modernizing unemployment insurance eligibility standards and pouring billions into the development of alternative...more

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Oct 27, 2012 Chris rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction-politics

The notion that President Obama wasn’t “focused” enough on jobs and the economy is an absurdity. Setting aside the dubious criticism that the President was so “distracted” by health reform that he ignored the economy—as if it were impossible for a president to walk and chew gum at the same time—the fact is, Obama did focus on recovery. Constantly. To wit, within four weeks of taking office, Congress passed, and the President signed, a massive $800 billion economic and jobs package—one which, mea...more

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Apr 13, 2013 David rated it 2 of 5 stars

exceptionally detailed recap of ARRA, the Obama stimulus bill -- the economic crisis leading to it, the process of getting it passed, etc.

Entirely pro-Obama spin and WAY too long, indulging in pointlessly repetitive tick-tock anecdotage about whichever politician or staffer gave author the most interviews (and then in a cab ride on the way from one meeting to another, Rahm Emmanuel took a phone call and cursed at the person on the other end of the line, followed by Larry Summers doing or saying...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Julie rated it 5 of 5 stars

I thought I had a good grasp of the Stimulus Package the Obama Administration put together in 2008/9 but after reading this book - I am shocked at the amount of information - TRUE information - I was missing. I think my biggest take-aways from this book are as follows:

1) the media did an incredibly poor job of reporting THE FACTS about the Recovery Act. The majority of the media outlets - regardless of political affiliation (which they shouldn't have) - only showcased rumors and misdirections fr...more I thought I had a good grasp of the Stimulus Package the Obama Administration put together in 2008/9 but after reading this book - I am shocked at the amount of information - TRUE information - I was missing. I think my biggest take-aways from this book are as follows:

1) the media did an incredibly poor job of reporting THE FACTS about the Recovery Act. The majority of the media outlets - regardless of political affiliation (which they shouldn't have) - only showcased rumors and misdirections from the republican party instead of doing their journalistic duty and spelling out the mess we were in and how the Recovery Act helped prevent worse things from happening. Additionally, they didn't report what all the Recovery Act contained, how the money was deployed and how it was under budget and therefore, able to invest in more than originally planned. Journalism, in this country of free press and speech, seems to be doing the American people a disservice. (not to mention though, that many americans don't really take the time to read anyway.)

2) Boehner was far more worried about protecting his job from Cantor than he was about doing the right thing for his constituents. Originally, Boehner was going to collaborate with the President but once he realized that Cantor was gunning for his job, he decided to protecting his power was more important.

3) The Stimulus worked - incredibly well - in many areas. Solyndra was one of the very few failures. And the stimulus didn't any money to the deficit.

4) The Stimulus has laid the foundation for American to be a leader in Green Energy. And it has helped considerably in education reform.

5) I'm not sure America is ready for the change needed.

6) every American must read this book - and other books that really explain the facts.

Now - Obama didn't do a good job communicating what was happening to the economy and the package and how it was working. And his administration admits this. But it's also up to the american people to find out the truth and this is but one great way to do so.

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Jan 09, 2013 Lars K Jensen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: us, obama, economy

Do you know those books that just make you feel constrained by Goodreads' 1-5 scale? Well, for me this is one of them.

Grunwald has gone where apparently no other (or, at least only a very few) have gone: Actually explaining what was in Barack Obama's Recovery Act (signed by POTUS in February, 2009) and what it has done to the US labor market, economy and research.

In 'The New New Deal' Grunwald both tells the story of the how the act came to be and how it passed through Congress, despite heavy op...more

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Oct 22, 2012 E.M. Hum rated it 4 of 5 stars

Michael Grunwald's 500+ page undertaking to explain every step of President Obama's Recovery Act and not only where the $800 billion dollar stimulus package went, but how it actually worked, reads easy - like a good report from a credible journalist(which it is.) The New New Deal gives insight into the congress men and women behind one of the biggest acts of transformative legislation in history and the steps it took to create, negotiate and enact it. The scope of the tax breaks, green energy ex...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Ldrutman Drutman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Part great behind-the-scenes reporting, part welcome cheerleading for the Obama stimulus planand part realistic look at the difficulties of implementation. Reading this book gives me a much better sense of what was actually in the stimulus, and the potentially transformative investments it is making for our economy. It's remarkable how much of this story got lost in the Republican sniping over rather irrelevant parts of the bill, and the general ways in which the media focuses on 98% politics, 2...more

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Nov 30, 2012 Michael Quinn rated it 4 of 5 stars

I don't think anyone will get far with this book unless they are already fans of Obama. Grunwald's discussion of the current administration is nothing short of gushing. Even for an Obama fan, it seemed like too much. Other than that, this is an impressive review of a completely over-looked, but highly relevant, piece of legislation. Grunwald's book should be read as a great paean to effective governance, showing what our public institutions can accomplish with the right mix of effective leadersh...more

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Feb 01, 2013 Kati rated it 5 of 5 stars

You don't have to be a policy wonk to enjoy this book. It reads like a novel, telling the many stories behind the Recovery Act and how it evolved into something completely different within the 24 hour news cycle. It also explains the role of government and what it really means to a society, and how people have overlooked how crucial our infrastructure is to being a fully-functioning society.

If you enjoy the show The West Wing (or in general the drama and excitement of politics) then you will rea...more

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Dec 24, 2012 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Michael Grunwald has written an impressive defense of the Recovery Act (i.e., "the stimulus"), which is so frequently lambasted from both Right and Left.

"It was the biggest and most transformative energy bill in U.S. history, financing unprecedented government investments in a smarter grid; cleaner coal; energy efficiency in every imaginable form; "green-collar" job training; electric vehicles and the infrastructure to support them; advanced biofuels and the refineries to brew them; renewable p...more

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Jan 02, 2013 Arun rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Recovery Act "was oversold as a short-term economic fix, undersold as a long-term catalyst for change, and fumbled as a political football." Just like the government hired a PR firm to get the word out about the Affordable Care Act, so too should it have hired help to get the word out about the Recovery Act. Instead, conservative media outlets demonized the stimulus bill as wasteful government spending, or liberal outlets as a bill that was too small to make up for the missing demand in the...more The Recovery Act "was oversold as a short-term economic fix, undersold as a long-term catalyst for change, and fumbled as a political football." Just like the government hired a PR firm to get the word out about the Affordable Care Act, so too should it have hired help to get the word out about the Recovery Act. Instead, conservative media outlets demonized the stimulus bill as wasteful government spending, or liberal outlets as a bill that was too small to make up for the missing demand in the economy. Well, did the Recovery Act do the job? "I didn't know if it was a good deal, but it reminded me of the New Deal, a mammoth government effort aimed at short-term Recovery and long-term Reinvestment," says the author.
The long-term reinvestment focused on areas such as energy, through the creation of ARPA-E, a section within the Department of Energy designed for high-risk but high reward investments in energy technology and development. During the first 2012 presidential debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger characterized the government's efforts in energy as simply picking losers and wasting $90 billion. With respect to green energy projects, Romney said that 50% of the investments failed. In fact, it was less than 1% and less than 10% for loan program at the time of the debate. Yes, certain companies like Solyndra failed. And no, the government should not be in the business of picking winners and losers (according the publications like The Economist). And no, we have not seen all of the fruits of the government's long-term energy investments yet. But just like government investments in the Internet paid off, and just like the government helped launch the aerospace, semiconductor, and biotech industries, so it seems to have begun doing with energy technology and development.
Generally, the goal of the Obama administration's investments were not to subsidize clean energy and thus provide temporary profits to clean energy companies. Rather, the long-term goal is to create a clean energy system that can take over when oil supply ends and that the U.S. can export to the rest of the world (and that prevents the externalities of coal). The medium-term goal is to create a clean energy system that can co-exist with natural gas (which is being buoyed by the boom in U.S. shale gas, an energy source cleaner than coal). In addition, the goal is to create industries and jobs that do not yet exist, but that will come into being considering the ingenuity of researchers currently working on energy issues and private entrepreneurs that have yet to start tinkering. In the future, the U.S. will be a leader in energy and we can say that it started with the long-term investments in the Recovery Act of 2009.(less)

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Dec 31, 2012 Pierre rated it 5 of 5 stars

"In real dollar terms, the Stimulus was 50% bigger than FDR's New Deal and more than the Louisiana Purchase and the Marshall Plan combined." That statistic alone, cited by Grunwald in the introduction, shows just how big and important the 2009 Stimulus Bill was for our economy at the time (i.e. to avoid a cataclysmic economic depression), laying the groundwork (Obama's "New Foundation") toward building the next generation infrastructure for healthcare, energy, IT and education that is necessary...more

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Mar 15, 2013 Joey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Probably one of the better three-star books I've read. I dropped it from four-stars to three because of an unforgivable stretch of something like 50 pages with arcane and technical details of the Recovery Act's green energy successes. I'm all for green energy, but it felt like this wasteland of technobabble just threw the brakes on what was up to that point a very enjoyable read. I never really recovered after that.

But to be fair, Grunwald is clear and persuasive with his thesis: the Recovery Ac...more Probably one of the better three-star books I've read. I dropped it from four-stars to three because of an unforgivable stretch of something like 50 pages with arcane and technical details of the Recovery Act's green energy successes. I'm all for green energy, but it felt like this wasteland of technobabble just threw the brakes on what was up to that point a very enjoyable read. I never really recovered after that.

But to be fair, Grunwald is clear and persuasive with his thesis: the Recovery Act saved America from a fate much worse than what it actually suffered, but Obama truly got obliterated in the war of public perception. By and large, the public hates the "bailout," thinks it did virtually nothing, and now politicians literally cannot use the word "stimulus," probably for another two or three generations. But, as Grunwald I think accurately demonstrates, all of these conclusions at which the public has arrived fly in the face of the facts. But who cares about the facts? The Republicans won the hearts and minds campaign.

I take issue with Grunwald, however, because I do feel he was unfair to some extent in vilifying the Republicans for failing to go along with the Recovery Act back in February 2009, for fighting it when America was going down the toilet. He paints the party as one of obstructionists, which, to be fair, it was and is, but there is more nuance to the issue than he lets on. Specifically, I don't believe that the minority party is obligated to passively go along with the majority party, even when the country is in a tight spot. That seems to be Grunwald's argument: the Republicans should've noticed the country was falling off a cliff, felt bad for causing the morass, and then just rolled over and let the Democrats do whatever they wanted. To be fair, I'm sure the Republicans of 2009 didn't want to see America enter a depression -- they simply legitimately disagreed about the methods by which to stop that from happening. I think it was a legitimate debate -- but there wasn't time to have it. The Act had to be signed NOW, and the Democrats were in power. But still I think Grunwald failed to see the situation from the Republican angle; to him, the Republicans caused the financial meltdown with eight years of horrible financial policy, so they had no business not just going along with Obama. I just think it's an unfair take on the matter.

But, again, overall, I think Grunwald wrote a great book, and I think he was spot on with most of his analysis.(less)

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Apr 05, 2013 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

This book showed massive evidence that the money from the bail out which our last election GOP commercials claimed were "wasted" on programs actually were NOT wasted. It is a tough read, tons and tons of testimony and reports and other means from a journalist who tried really hard to sort through the political muck and get to the truth.

This book helped shed light on how much the GOP was fibbing in their review of the Obama administration. As an registered Independent I had to go to this length...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Mason rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fall-2012

Election-cycle literature tends to be either hyperbolic (To Save America) or overly simplistic (It’s The Middle Class, Stupid!), or, if you’re Sean Hannity, both. Therefore, this 500-page piece of even-handed, thoroughly researched, energetically relayed investigative journalism is a breath of fresh air. Unlike so many political writers, Grunwald doesn’t begin at his conclusion and then argue towards it—he spends months and months taking in every meeting, poring over every record, learning the O...more

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Oct 30, 2012 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

I may be overrating this due to the paucity of good non-fiction writing I've been able to find lately (and, okay, maybe my partisan bias). Most of the non-fiction I've read in the last couple of years have fallen into one of two categories: the slog and the shallow. The slog is a highly informative book that I had to force myself to finish (The Dictator's Learning Curve, Convicting the Innocent, The Ballad of Abu Ghraib) and the shallow is an easy to read book from which I learn very little of s...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Michael Berman rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: current-events

The short version: Obama won the policy battle (the Recovery act provided both short-term stimulus and allowed Obama to implement many of the objectives on which he campaigned) but lost the politics war (how many times will the word "stimulus" be mentioned at the DNC this week?).

The author is a bit breathless on the topic of the green initiatives in particular, but he makes the case on the short-term stimulus quite well. No less a center-right authority than The Economist reviewed this favorabl...more

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