The Daily Beast- 6 Revelations From Michael Grunwald’s ‘The New New Deal’
Matthew Zeitlin: ‘The New New Deal’ will change how you look at President Obama’s stimulus forever.
Although the presidential election is now in full swing, one piece of legislation is hardly mentioned: the stimulus. The $787 billion piece of legislation, passed soon after Obama took office was both gargantuan in size and in how much it tried to do. The legislation was supposed to arrest the massive economic contraction and keep unemployment down, while setting the foundation for the Obama administration’s ideas on how to transform America’s transportation, energy, and education policies. And yet, with unemployment still above 8 percent, the stimulus is widely seen by many Democrats as too small and only marginally effective, while Republicans portray it as a complete boondoggle that is a symbol of everything wrong with the Obama administration. Into the breach—and just in time for the last few laps of the general election—steps Michael Grunwald, a national correspondent for Time, with his new doorstop of a book, The New New Deal. Grunwald tells the story of the stimulus from Obama’s meetings with his economic team before the election all the way to the stimulus’s still-ongoing projects today. The book is not only a comprehensive chronicle of what’s in the bill and what it’s done, but it’s also full of revelations of how the bill was written, passed, and then implemented. Here are some of the biggest scoops:
