Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20121020 : vimarsana.com

Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book TV 20121020



washington establishment into helping him pull off this deal with the madigans back here in illinois. .. for the tech and you send your brother to a meeting in a coffee shop with him and tell him to act like the whole world is listening. keep this under wraps because for whatever his reasons are. rahm emanuel is not on the phone for is that. he is sending his brother to a guy he thinks is going to give him money for the pick. >> what is he doing there? okay. thanks, everybody. thanks for having us. we are around to sign books for answer more questions if you want. >> thanks to booktv too. [applause] >> booktv is on facebook. like us to interact with a booktv guests and viewers and get up-to-date information on events. facebook.com/booktv. >> michael grunwald prevents his thoughts on the hundred dollars stimulus bill, the american recovery and reinvestment act, financial law by president obama and submit -- february 17th, 2009. this is about 50 minutes. [applause] >> thanks, all of you for braving the rain. i am thrilled to start by tour in new york. my wonderful parents are here. the only new yorkers who go to florida to visit their grandchildren. there are a lot of facts and figures and fun characters and colorful stories in this book. i knew it was going to be controversial. it is a revisionist history of the obama stimulus and just about everybody hates the obama stimulus. sometimes it feels like obama hates it too. he won't say the word stimulus any more. kind of hard to blame him. a year after it passed the percentage of americans who believe the stimulus created jobs was lower than the percentage of americans who believed elvis was a live. at one point i tell a story how obama told his cabinet that the stimulus was the only thing less popular than he was. in any case when you put the words change and obama this close together you are going to get yelled at. "the new new deal," right wingers won't except the old new deal and left wingers don't think this spineless sellout of the president is fit to share a book jacket with the new deal. i had a feeling some readers would not get past the first four words and i was right. a few weeks ago i got a google alert that "the new new deal" was in the new republic. i was really psyched because i have written a lot for that magazine and have a lot of friends there. i click on the link. there's a blog post by a 23-year-old researcher who announces right away he couldn't even make it to the first page. he couldn't get past the first four words, but not these four first words. from the forward he wrote it was so disturbing, so washington that i had to put the book down. addressed to a woman i can only assume is grunwald's wife it reads as follows. to christina, my stimulus. he was trashing my dedication page. i don't think the terrorists who are trying to kill salman rushdie ever trashed his dedication page. so washington, says this kid who lives in washington. a woman like only assume is his wife. i can only assume you are single. if christina really is his stimulus does that mean she prevented him from collapsing into an unprecedented depression? if we accept the merriam-webster definition of stimulus as something that rouses or incites to activity, is noted comes across as a strangely explicit display of rivalry. come visit us in south beach and we will show you that. my stimulus is here tonight. where did she go? there she is. christina did prevent me from collapsing into a depression. anyone who has written a book can empathize with that. she definitely rouses to activity. change that diaper. and obama's stimulus did too. $800 billion american recovery and reinvestment act, he signed a month after he took office. it may become a national joke but it did prevent american from collapsing into a depression and it has rows all kinds of activity. it wants over 100,000 projects to upgrade roads and bridges and subways and military bases, fish hatcheries. i could go on all day. it transforming america's approach to energy, education, health care, transportation and more. it is one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in modern american history. the short-term recovery part as well as the long term reinvestment hard. is also the purest distillation of what obama meant by change. it is a major down payment on his campaign promises. the story of the stimulus, not only a fun and gripping story but a microcosm of the obama era. the best way to understand the president, his policies, his approach to politics, his achievements and his troubled marketing. also the best way to understand his enemies. this book documents the republican plot to destroy obama before he even took office. you always heard about it and imagine it must be there. i got these guys to tell me about it in the secret meetings where eric cantor and mitch mcconnell planned last act of power so before i open it up to what you want to talk about i will talk a little about the stimulus because it really is a new new deal and a bit about obama because there's more and less to him than meets the eye. i spent nine years as a reporter at the washington post before i escaped the beltway with my florida girls. government is not a new topic for me. i do not think i could have written this book if i still lived in washington. the group think is too strong. it is almost impossible to overstate the power of the d.c. conventional wisdom that the stimulus was a ludicrous failure and it is totally uncool to talk about it without rolling your eyes and making a little ironic comment, you totally stimulated the economy when you gave that panhandler a dollar. even obama joked that his annual thanksgiving party that he saved or created four turkeys. my friends here, they know i have a contrarian streak. i don't do group saying. i am the guy who visited the gulf after the bp spill and moved the environmental damage is wildly overstated and i was right. i have data. arguing that the stimulus was "the new new deal" was not just contrarian. it was considered delusional. arguing that the bp spill didn't happen. we will discuss why. combination of republican distortion, incompetent white house communication, brain did media coverage, the unfortunate timing of the jobs bill that passed when the u.s. was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs of month. the financial earthquake had hit, the economic tsunami had not hit the shore. in 2010 i was 1,000 miles away and oblivious to the prevailing stimulus narrative but i did become aware because i write a lot about the environment that the stimulus included $90 billion for clean energy which was leveraging another $100 in private capital. the united states was spending $3 billion a year on clean energy before the recovery act. in 1999 washington completely knocked president clinton's pie in the sky plan to send $6 billion over five years on clean energy. it was that on arrival in congress and obama got $90 billion in his first month before his staff could even find a bathroom in the west wing. just ridiculous. the stimulus was pouring rivers of cash into wind, solar and other renewable energy efficiencies and every imaginable form and advance biofuels, a electric vehicles, cutting edge research, a smarter grid, cleaner coal, factories that make that green stuff in the united states and it was by far the biggest energy bill in history. it got me curious what else was in the stimulus everyone was laughing about. i did some dogged investigative reporting and the stimulus also launched race to the top which was a real of moment. that you heard of race to the top? i heard about it and i knew it was a huge deal in the education reform world that was supposed to transform public schools. i had no idea it was the stimulus program. did any of you? it became clear that there was a huge story hidden in plain view. most of the stimulus was just standard keynesian stimulus, pumping money into the economy when the private economy had gone into hiding, trying to generate demand through tax cuts for 90% of the work force, gigantic checks to prevent massive layoffs of teachers and cops, aid to victims of the great recession, basic infrastructure projects. then you look and it has $27 billion to computerized our pen and paper health care system so a doctor doesn't kill you with his chicken scratch and writing. authorized a new high-speed rail network, the biggest transportation initiative, extending our existing high speed internet to underserved communities with a modern twist on the new deal's rural electrification program, included america's biggest push into the electrical policy since fdr and the biggest infusion of research money ever, and eyes unemployment insurance, have >> reporter: since the new deal and launch new approaches to preventing homelessness, financing public-works, overseeing government spending, and the top economic forecasters do all agree it helped stop that terrifying free fall. gdp was crashing 8.9% in the fourth quarter of 2008. there's a depression. at that rate we would have lost an entire economy in 2009. it is funny, the job losses peaked in january of 2009 right before the stimulus past. that's bring the jobs numbers were really grim but they had the biggest quarterly improvement in 30 years. i told this to my editors at time magazine. i hope none of them are here. totally lying. they were like what? the stimulus? that was old news. unemployment was 9%. what else is there to say? things could be worse? things could be worse. actually it flew up to new york to make my case in person and you could see their eyes glazing over. i told them i felt like a reporter in 1938 trying to convince them they ought to do a story on the presidential initiative called the new deal. they looked at me like i was that blogger in the newsroom picking up a story of out bigfoot. to their credit they let me write an article about how the stimulus was changing america which led to this book and they did let me keep writing articles about this world stimulus that was on time, under budget, virtually fraud free, pretty impressive unmanaged, full of good government reform and totally unlike the stimulus everyone else was making fun of. it really is a big deal. it really is a new new deal. i will read from the passage where i explain why. cannot sell it liberals claim the recovery act pales in comparison to the new deal. it did not create new government workers and alphabet agencies like the wta and the ccc. didn't establish new entitlements like social security and deposit insurance. new federal responsibility like security regulation and labor relations. it didn't set up workfare programs for the creative class like the federal theater project, a federal music project for federal art project. obama aides grumble it could have used the new federal writers' project to turn out better pro stimulus propaganda. it did not raise taxes. it reduced taxes for the vast majority of american workers although very few of them noticed. obama and his aides thought a lot about the new deal while assembling the recovery act but in some ways it is apples to bicycle comparison. fdr forced the new deal through a broad of sometimes contradictory initiatives acted and adjusted over several years the stimulus was one piece of legislation called together and squeezed through congress before most of obama's appointees were nominated. in new deal was a journey, the recovery act was just a bill on capitol hill. but it was an astonishingly big bill. in constant dollars was 50% bigger than the entire new deal. twice as big as the louisiana purchase and the margin plan combined. multibillion-dollar line items were erased and inserted with casual keystrokes, obama aides to serve then-president clinton occasionally paused to recall their feudal push for a $19 billion stimulus that seemed impossibly huge in 1993 with vicious internal battles over a few million bucks for beloved programs that seem too trivial to discuss. after a live microphone cause vice president biden calling the health-care the big frigging deal, suggested -- we are on c-span, i suggested to the chief of staff the stimulus was just as big, bigger. we probably did more in that one bill than the clinton administration did in eight years, one adviser told me. critics often argue that while the new deal left behind iconic monuments like the hoover dam, skyline drive, fort knox, the stimulus will leave a legacy of sewage plants, repaved potholes and state employees who would be laid off without it. even recovery act architects feared like winston churchill putting it to seem, in reality creating its own icon, the world's largest farm, half-dozen of the largest solar farms, zero energy border stations, stated the are battery factories, eco friendly coast guard headquarters on a washington hillside. it is also restoring called icons like the brooklyn bridge and the dave bridge, the the the everglades and dammed up the river, seattle's tight place market and the staten island ferry terminal. its main legacy like the new deal will be change. that is its main theme. is not in new deal. obama is not a classic new deal liberal. he shares some of fdr's traits, self assurance bordering on egomaniac, harvard pedigree and even keel and allergy to ideologues he is not the second coming of fdr. he didn't grow up rich and didn't battle polio, he doesn't welcome the hatred of the elite and has a unique bond with the masses. doesn't share roosevelt's mistress of experts and take his campaign promises much more seriously than fdr ever did but the recovery act did update the new deal for a new year of. was obama's one shot to pursue his vision. a down payment on his agenda of curbing fossil fuel dependence and carbon emissions, modernizing healthcare and education, making the tax code more progressive and government more effective and building a sustainable competitive twenty-first century economy. let me talk about obama because this book is about his vision. i did like to reveal some new psychological pherae of the man. his dad was an economist. really, thank david maraniss for that stuff. pages are basically the same, no drama, surrey girl, low blood pressure, comfortable in his skin, somewhat aloof. almost comically reasonable alpha male you will find in a non in sane biography. he is droll and chill. there are funny stories about him. in october of 2008 after lehman brothers collapsed and the john mccain campaign was imploding with the economy obama said one of his advisers is too late to hand this pile of scrap to john mccain and a party that created it? the adviser said probably too late. obama goes at least we are buying low. not low enough it turned out. in december when his economic aid christina romer called with the first jobs report she said i am so sorry, the numbers are horrible. he goes it is not your fault -- yet. at one point david axelrod was in the white house, he said aloud he wondered what it would be like to govern in good times. the president laughed. i you kidding? good times we never would have gotten the job. my book does what other books don't. look at obama through the lens of his belief and policies. a lot of fly on a wall conversations in the white house in the back rooms of capitol hill but this book gets beside battery factory that high-speed rail meetings and a facility of that infamous solar manufacturers, solyndra. my novel approach to evaluating this president was to figure out what he is doing and this is the most important thing you should know about barack obama. he has mostly tried to do what he said he would do. he came into office with a well-defined theory and try to put it into practice. sounds boring. the book is more interesting than that. no drama. his campaign agenda didn't attract much attention partly because everyone was obsessed with his race and pastor and ads comparing him to paris hilton and partly because his agenda was mostly the standard democratic agenda of reversing the bush era and investing in the future. he cares about policy but is not a policy entrepreneur and his campaign was not about new ideas. was about a relentless message of change and the aspiration weekend believe i addendum, the sense that he would follow through on old ideas that never seemed to go anywhere and he has. except for those ideas about changing washington and moving beyond partisan conflict. those didn't really pan out. there is an awful lot of partisan conflict in this book. on the upper west side i should probably be telling war stories about obama versus the republicans. but because i am a contrarian i thought i would read a little bit of my take on obama vs hillary because it helps explain the next four years. the case for obama was not substantive case for changing policies. hillary was making a similar case with a better resume. the case for obama was a political case for why those policies never seemed to change. implied hillary was part of the problem. america couldn't afford another decade of clinton wars. the political pettiness and nastiness that exploded during the clinton era was the fundamental obstacle to fundamental change. hillary's one word explanation for the status quo's persistence was republicans. obama's one word explanation was washington. the endless spin cycles, insult industries and pull driven platitudes that made tough choices and common sense compromise impossible. as a symbol and a participant hillary was inextricably linked to the washington gridlock machine, the bickering and parsing, he turtle mitigation of the 60s. she could never make a critical we are one people speech or bring people together to solve big problems. she tried and failed in 1994 with her husband's health-care plan. the case for hillary was she knew how to fight republicans. she was comfortable in the muck. the case for obama was he could move politics beyond the mock. obama's ideas about changing politics were always a means to the end of changing those policies. in springfield when he announced his campaign for president he listed the four main problems he was running to solve. the tendons on oil that threatens our future, a health-care crisis, schools where too many children aren't learning and families struggling paycheck to paycheck this by working as hard as they can. the real solutions would be impossible until washington moves beyond the noise and the rage. what stopped us from meeting these challengess is not the absence of sound policies and sensible plans. what stopped us, failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics, the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, chronic avoidance of tough decisions, preference for cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems. that was the essence of obama's case against hillary clinton and it was wrong. it turned out it was possible to make progress on long-term problems even when washington remained distracted by the petty and the trivial. the proof would be in the recovery act. it would produce dramatic change in energy, health care, education and squeeze on struggling families before the new foundation for growth, without working consensus or any pause in the scoring of political points. this is a book about change. the first word of the book. it purveyed the sounds change requires 60 votes in the united states senate. obama took office during an economic cataclysm and decided in an emergency, changing the country was more important than changing the capital. the central drama of this book is literally the central section, how obama pushed this change into law in his first month. wasn't clean and it wasn't pretty. rahm emanuel was in the middle of it so it wasn't suitable for younger years either. the whole stimulus debate was a case study in obama to the disillusionment addicts of the

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