The New New Deal (67 page)
Authors: Michael Grunwald
(16) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell wanted to prevent Obama from claiming bipartisan victories; he publicly acknowledged that his top priority was making Obama a one-term president.
(17) The top chart shows how President Bush converted President Clinton’s surpluses into record deficits. The second chart shows that the deficit was mostly created by the Bush tax cuts, the Great Recession, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The stimulus did add to the deficit for a few years, but its impact on our current fiscal situation is negligible.
(18) President Obama speaks at Solyndra, alongside a robot holding one of the company’s innovative solar panels. Solyndra was once the toast of Silicon Valley, raising a billion dollars from elite investors and a half-billion-dollar stimulus loan. It became a Republican attack line after it went bankrupt in September 2011, but the Obama administration always knew that some of the Recovery Act’s $90 billion worth of clean-energy investments would fail. Overall, the solar industry has expanded sixfold since 2008, and U.S. renewable power has doubled.
(19) The New Deal dammed dozens of U.S. rivers. Obama’s new New Deal included the largest dam removal in U.S. history, restoring salmon runs on the Elwha River in western Washington.
(20) The Recovery Act also jump-started New York City’s Second Avenue subway project, which had been on the drawing board for decades.
(21) A General Motors manager delivers the first Chevy Volt battery from its new plant in Brownstown, Michigan. The Recovery Act included $2 billion to create an advanced battery manufacturing industry almost from scratch, financing 30 domestic factories.
(22) A Navy Riverine Command Boat tests algae-derived biofuel produced by the stimulus-funded company Solazyme. The Recovery Act dragged the advanced biofuels industry out of the lab, financing the country’s first commercial bio-refineries.
(23) Vice President Biden gives President Obama some support.
© DAVID WHITMAN
MICHAEL GRUNWALD
is a senior national correspondent at
Time
magazine. He has won the George Polk Award for national reporting and many other journalism prizes. He is the author of
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
. He lives in Miami Beach with his wife, Cristina Dominguez, and their two children, Max and Lina. His website is
www.michaelgrunwald.com
.
The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise
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Introduction: Things That Never Were
1
usher in a new birth of freedom:
Obama announcement speech, February 10, 2007,
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=76999#axzzlpxkCjpbY
.
2
“reinvent the economy to seize the future”:
Barack Obama,
Change We Can Believe In: Barack Obama’s Plan to Renew America’s Promise
(New York: Three Rivers Press, 2008), p. 246.
3
Steven Chu, a quantum physicist:
Michael Grunwald, “Can Steven Chu Win the Fight over Global Warming?,”
Time
, August 23, 2009,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1916282,00.html
. I first heard Chu complain about photosynthesis when I traveled with him to China in the spring of 2009 for this profile.
4
using an atom interferometer:
Holger Müller, Achim Peters, and Steven Chu, “A Precision Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift by the Interference of Matter Waves,”
Nature
, February 18, 2010.
5
Chu was ARPA-E’s intellectual godfather:
Steven Chu testimony, House Committee on Science, March 9, 2006,
http://www7.nationalacademies.org/ocga/testimony/Should_Congress_Est_ARPA_E_Rising_Above_the
_Gathering_Storm.asp
.
6
a cabinet meeting led by Vice President Joe Biden:
I attended the meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 29, 2010.
7
Obama’s approval ratings were around 70 percent:
Gallup has tracked Obama’s approval ratings throughout his presidency at
http://www.gallup.com/poll/113980/gallup-daily-obama-job-approval.aspx
.
8
Within a year, the percentage of Americans:
According to a CBS News/
New York Times
poll on February 11, 2010, just 6 percent of the public thought the stimulus had created any jobs. According to a CBS News poll from 2002, 7 percent of Americans believe Elvis is alive.
9
“avoid the word ‘stimulus’ like the plague”:
Obama press conference, September 10, 2010.