Act of recovery: only one national reporter, Michael Grunwald, bothered to take a detailed look at how well the $787 billion stimulus was spent. What he discovered confounds the Beltway conventional wisdom.

• Author: Cooper, Ryan
• Position: The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era - Book review

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

by Michael Grunwald

Simon and Schuster, 528 pp.

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Twenty-eight days after taking the oath of office, Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, otherwise known as the stimulus, a $787 billion measure to combat the economic cataclysm then engulfing the American economy. Soon, the mainstream narrative coalesced into two opposing camps. Conservatives, denying economic consensus and their own previous beliefs (Mitt Romney proposed the largest stimulus of the 2008 campaign), settled on a message that the Recovery Act was a colossal waste of money that would create no jobs and do no good. Liberals, led by economist-pundits like Paul Krugman, insisted that the stimulus was far too small and that the Obama administration had committed high-order negligence in not securing a bigger one.

A number of books by journalists have subsequently been based on the latter point, including Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery, by Noam Scheiber, and Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind, both written in the principals-in-the-room style used so successfully by Bob Woodward. They start from a similar premise--the economy remains weak, and therefore the stimulus failed in its stated goal to restore robust employment--and attempt to explain what went wrong in the negotiation of the stimulus. But--incredibly--very few journalists have taken a deep, sustained look at the stimulus itself to see what is in it and how it's been working.

That is part of what makes Michael Grunwald's The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era such an achievement. An award-winning senior national correspondent for Time magazine, Grunwald is the only reporter in America who has invested the time and shoe leather necessary to really understand the stimulus as a program--not just how the legislation came together, but how the money was allocated and overseen and whether the projects and programs it has funded were worthwhile. In doing so he debunks much of the received Beltway wisdom about the program. It is the rare book that finds an enormous untold story hiding in plain sight, like a coworker discovering there has been a rhinoceros standing in your building's lobby for the past four years.

After all, the stimulus was not some piddling appropriation for the Department of Commerce. It was a bill of...