Michael Grunwald | Author. Journalist.

Don’t Tell Anyone, but the Stimulus Worked.

admin — Mon, 17 Sep 2012 17:37:21 +0000

New York Times Sunday Observer: David Firestone…”The reputation of the stimulus is meticulously restored from shabby to skillful in Michael Grunwald’s important new book, “The New New Deal.” His findings will come as a jolt to those who think the law “failed,” the typical Republican assessment, or was too small and sloppy to have any effect.”

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Obama Owes Us An Explanation

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:36:07 +0000

When President Barack Obama takes the stage this week at the Democratic National Convention, inside Charlotte’s aptly chosen Bank of America Arena, he owes us an explanation for why the economy has been working so much better for financial behemoths than it has for ordinary people.

He needs to enhance our understanding of why, nearly four years after he moved into the White House, millions of Americans are still threatened with the loss of their own homes. He needs to bring us up to speed on why tens of millions of working-age people are scrambling to find adequately paying jobs.

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Valerie Jarrett Put ‘Inappropriate’ Political Pressure On Energy Stimulus Head

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:34:43 +0000

For months, Republicans have argued that political pressure from the White House may have been responsible for the government’s loan to Solyndra, the now-infamous failed solar power company.

But a new book uncovers another glaring example of political pressure under President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan, and in this instance, the loan was ultimately rejected.

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Anti-Obama best-sellers speak volumes

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:27:25 +0000

It’s a good thing President Obama already has written two autobiographies; otherwise, he would have a hard time finding a kind word on the bookshelves.

The publishing industry is pumping out anti-Obama books authored by conservatives in numbers normally reserved for young-adult novels about teenage vampires. More than 30 nonfiction titles blasting the president have been released by publishers this year, with several more hotly anticipated works expected to hit bookstores before the Nov. 6 election.

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Obama Won't Talk About Stimulus, But He's Happy to Talk About What It Did

admin — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 16:23:38 +0000

The stimulus is the law that dare not speak its name — but we’re hearing a lot about it anyway.

Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which emerged from the closet into the light at the Democratic convention, the $800 billion stimulus — the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — is considered unmentionable by most Democrats. Why wave a red flag in the face of Republicans poised to charge?

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‘Everything people think they know about the stimulus is wrong’

admin — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:25:21 +0000

Ezra Klein: Let’s begin with the obvious question. Did the stimulus work?

Michael Grunwald: Everything people think they know about the stimulus is wrong. It was called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and it did produce a short-term recovery. We dropped 8.9 percent of GDP in Q4 2008. We lost 800,000 jobs in January 2009. We passed the stimulus. And then the next quarter we saw the biggest jobs improvement in 30 years.

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Polling the power of campaign lies, security ideas for 9/11′s 11th, stimulus stories

admin — Sat, 08 Sep 2012 03:56:09 +0000

The New New Deal – a terrific book just out by Time senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald – is an encyclopedia of stories that most other reporters missed every day for the past three years because the stories were as unsexy as they were important. Grunwald zeroes in on the nuts and bolts and trials and tribulations of implementing the president’s 2009 stimulus package. (See, I told you it’s not sexy, just hugely important.)

His account explains how things work and don’t work in Washington. For example, I’ve always wondered how the Obama people blew even the simple branding of the stimulus, and Grunwald provides all the details, including how they ended up with a logo for the too-small signs that adorn the stimulus act’s projects that is as unappealing and indecipherable as the name of the act itself. (Seriously, why didn’t they use the title of Grunwald’s book instead of “American Recovery and Reinvestment Act”?)

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Michael Grunwald Compares Stimulus Coverage To Pre-Iraq War Media ‘Groupthink’

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:17:04 +0000

After two years reporting on President Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus package, a piece of legislation long derided by Republicans and barely discussed now by Democrats, Time senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald concludes in a new book that the conventional wisdom in Washington political and media circles is all wrong.

In The New New Deal, Grunwald argues that the 2009 stimulus package — officially the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act — produced meaningful, if hidden, change in areas like clean energy, education reform, health care, and transportation, while also helping to save the free-falling U.S. economy. While likening the Recovery Act to FDR-era reforms, he writes that the “impact has been less obvious than the original New Deal’s, but it’s just as real.”

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New Book Defends Barack Obama’s Stimulus

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:07:11 +0000

Michael Grunwald’s fascinating new book, The New New Deal, is bound to be a lasting word on Barack Obama’s presidency. It closely examines the early stimulus spending bill and argues that it, well, pretty much saved us from a free-falling depression. What we got instead, a Great Recession with endemic joblessness, was something to be grateful for. Sort of. That was never a message the American people were going to hear, much less love.

Read it and weep. The book itself is evidence of something amiss, as if the butler used a candlestick in the library as a silencing mechanism. This tells an engaging story we in the American public should already know, but believe me, this is indeed a new narrative of the massive domestic policy bill, the little known American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

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South Beach Author Michael Grunwald’s The New New Deal Turns Washington, D.C., on Its Head

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:03:35 +0000

By Tim Elfrink |

In our nation’s capital, real consensus happens as often as a noncreepy Rick Scott grin. Yet for the past couple of years, everyone in Washington, D.C., has agreed on this: President Obama‘s mammoth 2009 stimulus was kind of laughable.

Green-energy initiatives? Saving America from financial ruin? Hah!

Last week, though, that conversation turned on a dime. The reason? A new book from a writer based about as far, culturally speaking, from the Hill as possible: the heart of South Beach.

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