Time magazine's
award-winning Senior National Correspondent, Michael Grunwald, attracted a
roomful of people today at DC's Center for American Progress, for a discussion
and signing of his new book, The New New
Deal: The Hidden
Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012).
The
bottom line, Obama's Recovery and Investment Act, passed a month after he took
office, is most of the time dismissed as an invisible "stimulus" that
accomplished nothing. Is the real bottom line that the Obama administration's
PR is so bad that no one realizes Grunwald's assertions?
This
cocksure moderate's timely support, which he calls a revisionist history,
credits Obama's $800 billion stimulus with rescuing this country from a
depression.
It
launched a thousand projects, the change promised by Obama the candidate, said
Grunwald, a microcosm of his achievements and a surefire barometer of the right
wing's enmity--those people whom the author laughingly claimed have yet to
accept the New Deal [as anything short of too much government, though their
grandparents undoubtedly welcomed it].
The
new New Deal was the biggest energy bill in history, he continued, with an
absurd aside that the amount of damage to the Gulf by the BP oil spill has been
grossly exaggerated.
He
listed targets of the bill: wind and solar energy, electronic vehicles, cleaner
coal, green energy in general, and much more, a "huge story in plain view."
Huge
progress has been made at the infrastructure level, said Grunwald, and tax cuts
have been accomplished for most of the workforce.
Economists
agree that the act prevented a free fall, with the biggest improvement in the
area of jobs in the last thirty years--50 percent bigger than New Deal
accomplishments, with dollar figures adjusted accordingly. But the changes
aren't sexy. They involve sewer and pothole repairs and have spread wind and
solar farms throughout the country.
Obama
has laughed that the bill is less popular than he is and that he would not have
been elected in "good times," recruited merely to clean out Bush II's Augean
stables, an "economic cataclysm."
Grunwald
specified that the forty-fourth president is not about new ideas, which differ
from change per se. His idealistic goal of post-partisanship has gone the way
of led balloons. I still cringe when I think of all those turned-down dinner
invitations.
In
the midst of a comparison between the president and his 2008 opponent, Hillary
Clinton, the author directed Obama's censure to Beltway politics and Hillary's
toward the GOP.
Back
to his theme, what the benighted stimulus has accomplished, Grunwald further
specified the proliferation of digital medical data and "smart grids" that have
so benefited the system; the decline in the number of homeless people; the clean
energy revolution; the rapid spread of solar energy--all untainted by the corruption
that was a household word in the days of Bush 43 who, I read, won't even be
attended this year's Republican National Convention.
The
author calls himself the "only guy who wrote anything positive" about the
stimulus, no passionate liberal himself but quite middle-of-the-roader, he
later told me.
In
response to questioning from CAP's president Neera Tanden and then the
audience, Grunwald called the greatest failure of the legislation the
still-burgeoning deficit, a GOP favorite preoccupation. Nor did the stimulus "sell." The public
complains about all the road construction interfering with their daily commute;
the construction of a new building for DHS was labeled overspending on
furniture.
Unemployment
did not descend below 8 percent and Congress was less cooperative than Obama
had hoped. He about-faced toward the ACA and other agenda items. As I noted
above, the president would be well advised to hire Grunwald and other
heavyweights to enhance his public image. The $8 billion funding has been the
most scrutinized distribution ever, with every cent accounted for.
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