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.

The complaint many of us at dag have had is that the initial stimulus did many good things but just didn't go far enough because it wasn't large enough to get us fully out of the severe recession and begin a turnaround that would generate much more job growth than we've seen. 

With many of us bitching about it because it wasn't large enough while offering relatively little or relatively faint praise (I plead guilty on this count), and the entire GOP and right wing hating it and relentlessly trashing and also misrepresenting it, it's no wonder that perceptions about it may have hurt more than helped Obama on balance. 

It looks as though this book is an attempt at a corrective, aimed at bringing about a greater and more appropriate appreciation of the legislation in a way that includes the use of actual facts.  I give Grunwald immediate props for the sheer act of optimism and hope reflected in such an attempt.  The campaign and White House communications folks, and ordinary folk Obama supporters, might pick up a few useful ideas, facts, and perhaps examples of benefits for real people from this account, since what has been done so far has not seemed to work so well.  For the dedicated Obama haters, the book might provide ammo to help salvage or even build support for the entire idea of stimulus as job-generating and -preserving economic policy, which has taken its share of hits of late.