The New New Deal (66 page)

(4) President Obama’s cabinet was responsible for putting the Recovery Act into action. The White House considered (
from left
) Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan to be its leading reformers.

(5) Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, runs interference for President Obama before a meeting with House Republicans. LaHood’s loyalty to the president was not a surprise, but his enthusiastic embrace of reform was.

(6) President Obama’s economic team was not a well-oiled machine, but it helped prevent a second depression. The team met in the Roosevelt Room on February 6, 2009. In the left foreground, Treasury counselor Gene Sperling talks numbers with Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag, while Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner makes a point to National Economic Council director Larry Summers. In the background, OMB deputy Jeff Liebman chats with NEC deputy Jason Furman.

(7) The president walks in the Rose Garden with senior adviser Valerie Jarrett (
far left
), Vice President Biden’s chief economist Jared Bernstein (
holding coffee
), Peter Orszag (
holding a diet Coke
), Council of Economic Advisers chair Christina Romer, and Jason Furman.

(8) After shedding over 800,000 jobs in January 2009, the economy slowly started to improve after the Recovery Act began to inject stimulus into the economy. Private forecasters and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office would later conclude that the stimulus helped avoid another depression and end a brutal recession.

(9) Blake Jones, the CEO of Namasté Solar, talks to Vice President Joe Biden and President Barack Obama on the roof of the Denver Museum of Science on February 17, 2009, minutes before the president signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. Jones tried cracking a joke, but Obama didn’t laugh; he wanted to talk solar policy. “He had twenty minutes, and he was going to make the best use of every one,” Jones later recalled. “He was purpose-driven. I was thinking: Is he on like this all the time?”

(10) Most of the Recovery Act was tax cuts, emergency fiscal relief to help states avoid layoffs and massive cuts in services, and aid to unemployed workers and other victims of the Great Recession.

(11) Governors were not required to post signs identifying stimulus projects, and the cluttered Recovery Act logo didn’t do much to drive the message, either. But the projects made a real difference.

(12) For example, the Recovery Act included $6 billion for cleaning up the radioactive legacy of America’s nuclear program. Here a shuttered reactor’s exhaust stacks are demolished at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the largest stimulus project.

(13) There was often friction between the White House and congressional Democrats, but they agreed on almost all of their policy goals and accomplished a lot together. Obama listens to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, while Vice President Biden holds the lapel of House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn.

(14) Obama listens to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid before an event in Nevada.

(15) Even if House Minority Leader John Boehner (
left
) had been interested in working with Obama, he had to guard his right flank against House Republican Whip Eric Cantor.