 This morning we're going to be talking to Michael Grunwald who is a senior national correspondent for time and has just written The New New Deal, which you're all aware is an argument against a lot of Republican criticism that Obama's 2009 stimulus bill did nothing and was a huge political failure. So very interested to hear from you this morning, Michael. And Michael, you joined time in 2007 and before that you spent about a decade at the Washington Post, so lots of experience in D.C. But now you're based in Miami, you're telling me correct. Great. So I guess my first question for you, when President Obama was first elected in 2008, he was this incredible orator and it seemed like if anything he was going to be a tremendous communicator for much of his presidency. But this, it seems, the stimulus bill is a communication battle that he has lost. He has won the Substance War as you've argued, but he's lost this communication battle. How did that happen? That's a great question. Well, I guess in several ways. First of all, he lost it really fast, which is one of my favorite parts of the book. I sort of tell it in granular detail how this thing got out of control really quickly. But to wildly oversummarize, there were sort of four reasons he got busted on this. And the first, which now that I've become pigeonholed as an Obama shill, I should probably say that I actually think this is, I think this is the most important one, is that he had a really tough case to make for a couple reasons. The first one is the obvious one that in the fourth quarter of 2008, GDP was crashing at an 8.9% rate. That's a depression. And then January 2009, he takes office, we lost 800,000 jobs that month, we passed the stimulus less than a month later, and the next quarter has the biggest improvement in jobs in 30 years. It's great, right? Except it's improved from absolutely terrifyingly hideous to bad. And it's just hard to sell a jobs bill when jobs are disappearing. That's just a tough case. It's hard to sell anything when in double digit unemployment. And graft on to that this notion that Keynesian economics is sort of counterintuitive to most people. This idea that right when families and businesses have to tighten their belt, he's coming right out of the bat by chucking another $800 billion and borrowed money into the economy right after this incredibly unpopular bank bailout. He was going to have a tough sell from the beginning. So I always try to remind people that this black guy whose middle name was Hussein who got himself elected president, he probably didn't become a political idiot on January 20th, 2009. He had a sort of tough case to make. That said, there were three other reasons that rather than ramble on, I'll try to rattle off quickly. One is that I think I do have some of the first reporting in this book about, you know, what people have called, basically correctly, the Republican plot to destroy Obama before he even took office. And they've done an unbelievable job, really a brilliant job of completely distorting what the stimulus was about. They made it sound like $800 billion worth of mob museums and levitating trains to Disneyland and, you know, snow making machines in Duluth and Congress. They made a lot of condoms and sod on the mall and all sorts of nonsense that actually none of that is in the stimulus. But it was all, you know, great sound bites. And they've really, rather than focus on trying to have a substantive debate about, you know, we'll talk about some of the massive policy transformations that were embedded inside this bill, they really focused on the cats and dogs. And when they couldn't find the cats and dogs, they made up cats and dogs. And that's been incredibly effective. And I think even Obama was surprised that, you know, during an economic emergency, you know, that he's passing, you know, a huge down payment on his agenda that everybody was, you know, yes, we canning about. And suddenly he's stuck in a debate about honeybee insurance. I think he was surprised about that, which leads to sort of reason number three is that the Democrats really did screw up the message. Being Democrats. And part of it was, you know, congressional Democrats, you know, you had Republicans sort of saying big government, big spending, big mess. And then you had the Democrats sort of saying, too small, too many tax cuts, not shovel ready enough. Or, you know, I don't like the catfish subsidies or, you know, or whatever. I mean, just quibbling about it instead of sort of making the case like, hey, wait, this is what he meant by change. It may not be perfect, but let's do it. And even Obama seemed to at times be sort of grudging about the whole thing. He was always saying about how he didn't intend to start his presidency with a spending spree. I do also in this, I think it's kind of a fun narrative. You know, this book is not really an argument. It's really a narrative. It's a story. And I do think the sort of story of how the White House got their messages crossed is kind of fun and perhaps frustrating to read. But there were some real questions about, you know, whether they should sell this as a jobs bill. Rahm Emanuel was sort of the main adherent of that versus kind of, you know, what I would say, should you sell it as a new, new deal? Where actually Joe Biden was more, was big on that. Anita Dunn was another, you know, and Obama did give a speech about the new foundation in April. But then, you know, then Doris Kern's Goodwin said it sounded like a girdle and, you know, it's never heard of it again. So that's three reasons you got, you know, bad hard sell Republicans, evil genius, Democrats, you know, floundering incompetence. And then finally you got the media, which really blew the story of the stimulus as badly as they blew the run up to the war in Iraq. You know, I get in trouble for saying this, especially when I'm in this town, but most of the national media, particularly the political media, is not interested in public policy. And when you do have, you know, the right saying it's a mess and the left kind of saying it's a mess, the sort of he said, she said, temptation is so strong. And the boy, let's dig into this and really see how it's going to transform the country. Temptation is so weak that I think you had this kind of perfect storm where the, you know, within a year, the percentage of Americans who believed that the stimulus had created jobs was lower than the percentage of Americans who believe that Elvis is alive. So it was kind of, they lost that battle quick. How did the story unfold for you? I mean, were you reporting on this back in January or February of 2009? Were kind of the signs to you that this was something to dig into and that this wasn't just a kind of shallow, well, this is a failure. That's a great question. You know, I did, I was assigned in January 09. I wrote, it ran in the inaugural issue. You can look it up. I wrote a story called How to Spend a Trillion Dollars. That was kind of about principles for the stimulus that actually I went back a few weeks ago and looked at it and it mostly stands up. There are a couple of things that I didn't understand that I would like to have back. But then I kind of forgot about it for a year and you didn't mind. I live in the public policy paradise of South Beach. So I was not part of this Washington group think where there was just this unbelievable herd mentality where you were not allowed to talk about the stimulus as if it were anything but an $800 billion joke. I mean, it just showed that you didn't get it. And when I did start getting into this, some of my friends of yours honestly thought I had lost my mind. I'm kind of a contrarian guy to begin with. I went down to the BP spill and wrote that the environmental damage was being exaggerated because I have very good scientific sources down there. But this was if I was writing that the BP spill hadn't happened. So I think that was helpful. What really got me into it was I write a lot about energy and there was $90 billion for clean energy in this bill when we were spending like a few billion dollars a year. And Bill Clinton in 99 had come up with this big clean energy plan. It was going to be five years, $6 billion. And he got laughed out of town. That was considered completely ridiculous. And then here Obama in his first month in office before his aides knew where the bathrooms were in the West Wing had come up with $90 billion. It was going to leverage another $100 billion for this industry that had been dead in the water after the financial collapse. And we're talking about just order of magnitude increases in wind, solar and other renewables, energy efficiency in every imaginable form. I think I mentioned that like New Jersey's energy efficiency program got a 95 percent, a 9500 percent funding increase. You had advanced biofuels, the smart grid, electric vehicles, the factories to build all this green stuff in the United States, clean energy research. These were all game changers. And so that kind of got me thinking, well, geez, I wonder what else is this thing. And, you know, being an amazing investigative reporter, I did a couple of Google searches. I was like, oh my God, Race to the Top is part of the stimulus. Like, I knew that there were like, you know, a million conferences like this one going on about how Race to the Top was the biggest education reform in decades. But I had no, like, did you know it was part of the stimulus? I bet a lot of you didn't. You know, high speed rail and, you know, the largest infrastructure investment since Eisenhower and the largest one time research investments ever. And, you know, health IT, which people have been talking about for decades, this idea that we need to drag this antiquated pen and paper medical system into the digital age so that your doctor won't kill you with his chicken scratch handwriting. You know, people have been talking about this. They'd maybe thrown like $20 million one year, $30 million another year. This thing had $27 billion with a B. I mean, they were going to do it. And so just clearly this, this gigantic story that was hiding in plain view. And, you know, I mean, I was like, I pitched it to my editors. Honestly, it felt like I was that you guys watched the newsroom. Right. It felt like that blogger who's always trying to pitch the story about how Bigfoot is real. Right. But to their credit, they let me write stuff about it. And, you know, and here we are. So you were talking about Clinton's energy bill. And I think it's interesting to note that there are so many Clinton alums in the Obama administration and, you know, many of whom had played a big role in the creation of this bill. How much of the bill can you kind of see Clinton era, you know, prints on? And is that a big part of its success, do you think? Well, one thing, I have two responses to that. One is that, and I talk, I have a whole riff in the book. It's actually one of my favorite parts about about like it's sort of a new way to think about about Obama versus Hillary. That I think sort of explains the next four years in a way that I won't give away the whole thing. But part of the idea is that Obama did not run on new ideas. He ran on the kind of same old democratic ideas and some bipartisan ideas that people have been talking about for years. He ran on change. And then he had that we can believe in addendum, which was sort of his way of saying that maybe this time the same old ideas are actually going to happen. And the sort of long story short of the stimulus is that it shows that it actually, it did. You know, but it was, you know, with the exception of race to the top and some of the education reform, this was really a kind of standard democratic agenda of reversing the Bush era. And, you know, kind of moving towards clean energy and laying the groundwork for health reform and, you know, promoting education and research and infrastructure and making the tax code a little bit fairer with the largest middle class tax cuts since Reagan. So in that sense, I think, you know, Clinton and Hillary Clinton and, you know, Joe Biden and everybody else who had been part of, and New America and, you know, CAP and everybody who's been sort of part of the democratic policy establishment sort of drove this thing. Because there are a few, but very few things where you'd be like, whoa, where did that come from? I mean, this was stuff people have been talking about forever. There wasn't. Now, the sort of Clinton night takeover of the Obama administration has in some senses been kind of well documented. I mean, you know, he comes into office and he, this is wrong. This is his first hire. And, you know, I think Hillary was number two and, you know, his entire economic team practically came from Clinton. But one thing, a story that had never been told, I think, before my book is this shadow transition that John Podesta led. This was after Obama, after Hillary finally conceded. One of the first things Obama did was he asked John Podesta to put together a sort of transition to the transition team. I mean, it had to be very secret so that Obama wouldn't get accused of measuring the drapes in the White House. And so he put together, I focused on the shadow economic team, and it was just, it was like all Clinton people. Bob Greenstein, who runs the Center on Budget down the road, he was the only non-Clinton person on the team. They were all giving him a hard time because his PowerPoint slides weren't formatted like everybody else. He was like, guys, I wasn't in the Clinton White House. I'm sorry. But it really was. This was, and I sort of quote, blind quotes from some of the Obama people grousing about how this is when the old guard took over. And there is some of that that I won't get into now. But one thing that I think is really important is that these Clinton guys, whatever their policy, minor policy differences with Obama, they did have one, what most set them apart was they had been through the Clinton wars. And they realized that this guy may have a halo of hope and change right now. But this economic emergency was that if you wanted to get something done, now is a pretty good time. And so even though it wasn't their agenda, Jack Lew actually wrote the memo from The Shadow Transition about stimulus, which I'd write about in the book and I actually posted recently at time.com. But one of the main themes of that book is that now is your chance to do change we can believe in. That maybe that lovely 70% approval rating will withstand the slime that you're about to get thrown at you. But just in case, this might be a good time to do some of the things you wanted to do, particularly in green energy. And I think that that attitude was very influential as they put this thing together. Speaking of energy, can you talk a little bit about Cylindra and the huge kind of, speaking of communication disasters that was. You know, it's funny. One of the things I write about in the book is that, you know, in addition to this sort of policy transformations that are in this thing, that there really was a new approach to government sort of embedded in this. You know, to wildly oversimplify, it's sort of instead of spreading money around the country like peanut butter to anybody who wants to build a road, you just raise your hand, you go to the cement heads in the state transportation department, tell them you want to build a road, you do your traffic study, you do your minority hiring report, you know, you check all the boxes, you're in compliance, you get your money. Nobody ever asked like, does this thing make any sense? Like, does this advance the public policy interests of the United States of America? And the stimulus to a remarkable extent and a completely unnoticed extent really was about trying to create these competitive, you know, where, you know, the good thing is like, you know, we're asking not just if you're shovel ready, but if you're shovel worthy. And, you know, do you have, you know, if you're a transit program, what are you going to be the economic benefits? What are going to be the ridership benefits? What are going to be the, you know, what's the, what happens if we don't do it? How terrible is that? And if this is handing out money, it's like you've got to compete. And do you have customers lined up? And do you have, et cetera, et cetera. The bad side is it requires some subjective decisions. It requires, you know, which is good in that it, you know, the sort of bureaucrats, right? These were, you know, public servants who worked for the government. Instead of just checking the boxes and making sure everybody's in compliance, they actually have to make some decisions. All right, that's a lot of lead up to Selindra. I did, when I, so I would talk to, I remember specifically asking Secretary Chu about this. I talked about it in depth with Arun Majumdar, who was the head of ARPA-E. They're kind of the new DARPA for energy. And he would tell me, he would say like, we are pioneers. And the pioneers were not afraid to fail when they set off across America. We are not afraid to fail. That's part of the, we are going to fail. And I'd kind of listen to him and then this was like in 2010 and I would say like, yeah, but what happens when you fail? And he said, we are ready for that. They were not ready for that. Selindra, Selindra was, you know, Selindra was a disappointment, but a totally expected disappointment. This, it was, I don't want to say it was like a no brain or judgment call. And I quote somebody blind in the energy department who, I remember if I said it was a he or she. So I'll just say this person, their, their first day at the energy department, they found out that the first line had gone to Selindra. And the person said, oh no. You know, this was somebody who had looked at Selindra in the private sector and was very skeptical of their high costs. But not everyone was skeptical. Selindra has raised a billion dollars in private capital before it ever got a government loan. You know, what I sort of mentioned in the book that they sort of, they kind of, you know, they were pretty arrogant and they acted like, you know, some sort of billion dollar company before they had really, you know, ever done anything. But they were, they were a billion dollar company. The Bush administration, which remember this clean energy loan program that has now become socialism and the death of free enterprise was started in 2005 by, by President George Bush. They couldn't get their stuff together. And, and in December of 08, they suddenly realized, oh my God, we haven't given a single loan. We've got to pick somebody. They picked, of their 143 applicants, they picked Selindra was the most promising company. They tried to get that done before he left office. The career civil service blocked it, said this is a good loan. This appears to be a very viable loan. But we have, you know, this was too hasty. It's going to take, you didn't cross all your T's and dot all your I's. They finally got it done in the Obama administration. And long story, somewhat shorter. It turned out it didn't work out. And the reason it didn't work out was because solar got cheap. They were based, they had this incredible new type of technology that, you know, their solar panels did not look like any other solar panel you've ever seen. They looked like lizard ladders kind of with these little, and they used an entirely different material. They didn't use silicon because silicon was so exorbitantly expensive. They were going to use something else. And they had this unbelievably high tech manufacturing process that I did go to Selindra, you know, after they started to get some bad press. And I was like, dude, this is a very complex way of making solar panels, which is a pretty cheap product. But they had, they had, they were, they had really gotten their stuff together. They were starting to sell. They had incredible customers like Frito Lay and Walmart and Southern California Edison was going to be building, you know, they had like 15 on all of their substations. They were going to be putting a Selindra panels. They were very cool. They clicked together like Lego. So you didn't need tools. They were very cheap to install, but then silicon got cheap and their entire business model fell apart and they went bust. You know, loans go bad. You know, if, if every one of these loans succeeded, that would mean that they were being too conservative and you didn't need government for these loans. But, but the sort of the flip side is that as solar has gotten cheap with in large part because of help from the support from the stimulus and also the Chinese stimulus, which has been very solar focused. Solar installations have increased 600% in the United States since, since Obama took office. You know, Selindra went down, solar cities going public. You know, Sun Run Homes has seen their business increase. I think it's now up to like 5,000% since, since January 2009. So it's true that there are going to be winners and losers, but what Obama really did or what the stimulus really did was pick the game. And the game is clean energy. And the, you know, there ought to be a great debate about whether we ought to be, you know, having this kind of green industrial policy. You know, the argument for it is that we're too dependent on foreign oil. We're broiling the planet with our carbon emissions. Our economy is too vulnerable to, you know, hurricane comes and suddenly, you know, gas prices spike or, you know, something goes crazy in the Middle East and our economy collapses. And then plus that these are the industries of the future, that there are millions of kind of jobs that play to our special sauce of innovation. Those are all good reasons to do it. But it's not like, you know, Joe Biden's like, it's not like we just picked Nissan or we just picked Solyndra. You know, they picked not just one solar manufacturer, but a dozen solar manufacturers, all with different technologies and different entrepreneurial approaches. And they didn't just pick solar manufacturers. They also picked solar, you know, they picked on the demand side and the supply side and all different parts of the solar chain. And then not just solar, but wind and geothermal and, you know, and even making fossil fuels more efficient. And then advanced biofuels and, you know, electric vehicles and the different parts of the electric vehicle and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They did the entire clean energy food chain and then the market will pick the winners and losers. But that's my weak defensive cylindra. How much, you know, say we do get a president Romney in November, how much could the clean energy components of this bill, other components, how much could this kind of be rolled back? You know, how ironclad are some of these investments versus others? Well, the first thing I would say is that in 2010, the Republicans can't, you know, they had their pledge to America, right? And I like plank number one of the pledges that we are going to roll back all this unspent stimulus money because the stimulus was a big joke. And I think at that, you know, at the end of 2010, I think there was still about $250 billion in unspent stimulus money. And actually they've only, of that $250 billion, they've only rolled back $0. So the idea that things will actually be taken back, you know, it turns out that people don't really like it when, you know, they're like guys doing their highway project and you say, like, stop, you're fired. You know, that seems to be, I think that there was less enthusiasm for that than people might have expected. I do think, you know, going forward, you know, so certain things that I think really needed a jumpstart, the smart grid is one example. Where now I think utilities will pick up the ball and, you know, sometimes it'll be fast and sometimes it'll be slow. But I think that's an area where you're really going to see, you know, you can't turn that back. I think once it started, we're on our way. And I think even for some of these, you know, wind is, and solar in particular, looking California, you know, you can get your solar panels for $0 down and you get a 20-year contract that guarantees you lower energy, lower electricity bills. I think this has by, you know, reducing the cost, things like electric vehicle batteries where I visited a company that is now, has come up with a better battery. Thanks to, you know, Obama's support and they're doing the battery for the next generation Chevy Volt and it's going to take probably $5,000 to $6,000 off the cost. Those are things that can't be turned back, which is a health IT, I think that's going to happen. You know, that has been waiting forever for a jumpstart and now it's already, we've already tripled adoption in a few years. It's the fastest growing industry in America because of the, you know, there's money out there and, you know, by 2015 just about all of us are going to have an electronic medical record and that will change the way healthcare is conducted in the future. Other things like high speed rail, you know, that's, you know, we'll see. I think that's become a political football. There used to be a lot of bipartisan support for so many things in the stimulus. Things like unemployment benefits and the smart grid and health IT and, you know, you know, the Obama's education reform, which actually some Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels have said nice things about, but in Congress it's become toxic because it's part of the Obama stimulus. I think what will depend and just the idea of stimulus, right? Romney had the largest stimulus plan of any of the 2008 presidential candidates and Paul Ryan voted for a $715 billion stimulus that was quite similar to Obama's $787 billion stimulus. But now that it's become part of the stimulus, this stuff has become politically toxic in Washington. The question is to what extent Romney will be sort of willing to embrace it as his own? And like so many things with Romney, there's stuff that in the past he had no problem with, but then now he, now ARPA-E is kind of the only thing that he will say is okay. Now even parts of Obama's healthcare bill are okay apparently. What time is it? Right, tomorrow we'll be back to repealing the whole thing. So let's go back to 2008, November and December of 2008 because you just had a really interesting piece in time and adaption from your book about these secret meetings of Eric Cantor and others where the basic mentality was we're going to oppose anything that Obama does no matter what. So this obstructionism was obviously a clear, you can see this clearly in the coming years, but can you talk about those meetings a little bit and what that meant for the stimulus? Sure, I mean there were a couple of them. One was Eric Cantor brought together his whip team and this was in December of 2008 when two million people had just been on the mall saying yes we can. And you know Obama was at 70% and everybody, and the Republicans were an endangered species and everybody was arguing whether they were the Whigs or the Federalist. And Cantor brought together his team and he said we are not going to roll over for this guy, we are going to fight. And they did not have policy people at that meeting. They just had communications and political people at this meeting because what he recognizes, we are not legislators anymore. We are communicators. And the most important, what was going to keep them, you know, the most important part of their message was not allowing Obama a clean bipartisan victory on anything. And that of course Mitch McConnell later said that publicly that I mean the basic, what they understood is that Americans, you know, so I am and probably a lot of you are paid to follow this stuff. But most Americans like they don't know what the hell is going on in Washington. All they know is like, you know, they hear about something happened and either it's bipartisan, which means sort of reasonable people got together and did what reasonable people do or it's the same old Washington bickering. And what they realized, what the Republicans realized, especially after Obama had promised bipartisan, post-partisan, you know, unpartisan Washington, they could turn him into a liar just by saying no. And so that was really, they realized that was key to their strategy. Mitch McConnell likes to talk about, well, not publicly, but within his caucus, he talked about 1984, that election, because everybody remembers, right, Reagan morning in America, big landslide. What McConnell remembered, but most people don't, is that every Democratic senator except for one got reelected. He remembers it because he was the one Republican who beaten incumbent that year. But his point, what he was telling his, and he had a demoralized caucus. I do talk about this meeting where they show up, it's January 09. You know, Bob Bennett is talking about how he gets up and says we might be a permanent minority. John McCain, who had a pretty rough year, gets up and sort of gives this sort of nasty, grouchy speech about how Republicans are walking off the cliff with women and Latinos. And what Mitch McConnell says is look, like this guy is just, you know, this guy's telling us he's going to have to tell America he's going to fix the economy. And if he does it, God bless him, we're all going to get reelected. But if he doesn't, and we say no, in two years, this is our ticket back. We just have to stay principled, stay together, and you know, in like five Republicans in the next few weeks announced they were retiring. But just about everybody else, they sort of rediscovered, you know, their message of fiscal discipline. Even though they were voting for a Jim DeMint amendment that would have blown another $4 trillion in tax cuts onto, you know, that was their stimulus plan. And they all supported it except for the three Republicans who voted no, plus George, who voted yes on the stimulus and George Vojnovich. So they hadn't really changed, but they had a message of no. And that was their ticket back. One of my favorite moments in the book is after the House Republicans voted unanimously against this thing, they had this retreat in Virginia where, you know, Obama had just passed this gigantic bill that's, you know, a huge down payment on his agenda, and they're having this huge celebration. John Boehner plays a tape of the vote, you know, as they were getting their asses kicked, and he gets a standing ovation. And Eric Canner jumps up and says, you know, we're going to have more votes just like this. And Mike Pence plays a videotape from the movie Patton, the scene where, you know, he's like, we're going to run through the enemy like crap through a goose. Right. You know, which he's talking about the Nazis. But, you know, they felt like this is our moment. This is our moment. We've found something to fight. And the polls were starting to show that the, you know, Obama was losing the stimulus battle. And even though substantively, this was a, you know, a center left dream, and they didn't care about the substance. They felt like this was, they had finally gotten their political message and they were right. Well, you have to imagine, if they're saying no to absolutely everything, were there any times that they were saying no and maybe that was the right thing to say? I mean, what aspects of the, I'm kind of asking you to argue against yourself a little bit, but what parts of the bill really were not well thought out or were not well executed? Well, I should first of all say that, you know, like the Republican National Committee put out a five page memo about my book, which everybody was like, oh, what was their rebuttal? There was no rebuttal. It was five pages of stuff that they cherry picked from the book that they think make Obama look bad. And, you know, their spin is interesting, but the facts are all there. So this isn't like, you know, this isn't just a cheerleading book. You know, there's stuff in it and there's, you know, there's a Valerie Jarrett story that I'm surprised has not started a congressional investigation of her putting inappropriate pressure on, you know, on one of these clean energy loans, not Cylindra where there was no pressure whatsoever. This was a different one. You know, this was an imperfect bill put together by imperfect people through an extremely imperfect process. And some of it didn't belong. You know, some of it was, you know, the best example is they tweaked the annual patch for the alternative minimum tax, you know, where every year they protect middle class taxpayers from getting hit by the alternative minimum, something they do every year. It should not have been in the stimulus. It's $70 billion of wasted, you know, it provides no stimulus. So really it was more like a $700 billion stimulus, but Olympia Snow insisted on it as it really sort of is a favor for Chuck Grassley, who was running around talking about how the bill was socialism. As Rom said, it was like the strangest $70 billion I ever spent and it wasn't my money. But this is one of the themes of the book is the sort of tyranny of 60 votes where bills that don't pass the Senate don't make change. And so to get 60 votes, Arlen Specter wanted $10 billion for NIH. And as Ron Klain points out, half the bad stories about the stimulus have been from NIH studies about like, you know, cocaine monkeys or, you know, you know, why is it that men don't like to wear condoms or, you know, all kinds of things that have been easy to ridicule because science often is. But, you know, if you wanted Arlen Specter to vote for it, there was going to be $10 billion for NIH. And so, you know, Daniel Inouye, who was, you know, the Senate Appropriations Chairman, he wanted $150 million for to reimburse the Filipino veterans of the Baton Death March, which is like a very worthy cause, but like sending money to Manila is not really, you know, great stimulus for Milwaukee. But, you know, he was the Senate Appropriations Chairman, he had to get something, you know, Blanche Lincoln wanted her catfish subsidies and so there are definitely a few, you know, there are elements of that in the bill. And then there was, you know, James Clyburn insisted that there had to be $3 billion for rural broadband, which I would say at best the jury is very out on how well that's going to work, you know, sort of sending broadband to, you know, sort of like the New Deal rural electrification. But I haven't done enough reporting to be absolutely sure, but there's some questions about that. So I think I'm certainly by no means saying this thing is perfect. But a shocking amount of it was just sort of standard Keynesian stimulus of, you know, tax cuts to people who aren't likely to save the money and aid to victims of the Great Recession and aid to states, which that there was some question about how well that would work, just, you know, states that were about to lay off all their cops and teachers and cut all their Medicaid programs and got these massive infusions of checks that helped them balance their budget. And I think at the time it wasn't clear how well that worked, but there have been a lot of empirical studies and that really helped prevent the depression. So definitely some cats and dogs, but the bulk of it was uncontroversial stuff. Well, I'm going to open it up now to questions that you all have. So does anybody have any questions they'd like to ask? Yeah. Oh, hold on one second. The mic. Oh, sorry. One question I had is one of the criticisms of the act from the left has been that it wasn't big enough. That basically the Obama administration kind of negotiated against itself. It went smaller than it could have gone. And that didn't have the kind of impact that was needed to slow the downturn or to boost growth enough. How do you respond to that? Well, I have a sort of two-part answer. The first part is, well, it's basically true, at least that it wasn't, you know, more aid to states would have saved more teachers' jobs. And we've actually, in the socialist Obama era, the public sector has actually shrunk by 600,000 jobs. So more state aid could have prevented some of that. More tax cuts could have put more money in people's pockets. More public works could have gotten more jobs for unemployed laborers. And in fact, after the stimulus passed, although there's been absolutely no attention paid to it, Obama has gotten another $700 billion in stimulus. He hasn't gone around saying, like, we need another stimulus because people hate stimulus. And as he says to his, I quote him, telling his economic theme, like, I get the Keynesian thing, but it's not where the electorate's at. But he has quietly, despite incredible Republican opposition to things like even small business tax cuts, which were, like, you'd think, that's, like, I quote George Voinovich, who was one of the two Republicans who finally crossed the aisle to support a diminished small business tax cut bill. He says that he was screaming at Mitch McConnell saying, like, these are our people. But finally, he did get it across the line. So more would have been better. He did get more. Even more would have been even better. That said, the stimulus could not have been one dime more than $800 billion. And if you read my book, I think that's, like, I hope that, you know, I know it won't, but it ought to put that argument to rest forever because I interview everybody who is in the room and everybody who is involved in the negotiations. And you had, first of all, you had these three Republicans, Colin Snow and Specter, who were saying absolutely no more than $800 billion. It still cost Specter his job. But you also had at least a half-dozen Democrats, Claire McCaskill and Ben Nelson and Blanche Lincoln and Mary Landrieu and, you know, at least a half-dozen because once you got to a half-dozen, it was clear that this thing wasn't going bigger. They drew the same line in the sand, no more than $800 billion. Actually, Mark Begich, who I quote on the record, right? I don't know who died and made him president. But he said, like, we decided this thing could not be bigger than $800 billion. That was just getting too big. And why too big? That's just too big. Arlen Specter had the same kind of thing. It's like a trillion was definitely too big. Even $900 billion kind of sounded too big. You know, there's no kind of economic theory for any of this, but that's what they decided. And, you know, these kind of liberal fantasies like, oh, if only Obama had campaigned for it if he'd gone to the grassroots, why didn't he go to Maine? And then Susan Collins would have had to support, what, I don't know, $850 billion. And then how was he going to go to Alaska too, and Arkansas? Like, they didn't really like him in Arkansas. $800 billion was a cap. I quote Brian Byron Dorgan, who's one of the senators who actually did want. He thought it should have been bigger, but he was in the room. And he's like, look, this is representative democracy. You know, at some point we had to say, what do you want? And that was what they wanted. And so it was, you know, as Ram said, he's like, I would like Paul Krugman to tell me how to seat Al Franken, who is sitting in Minnesota right now, you know, hasn't joined the Senate. That would be useful to me. Telling me that we need a bigger stimulus. That's not useful. You know, Paul Krugman doesn't need a supermajority to pass this column. Sorry. It's one of my pet peeves. Sure. Andres, you can go. We'll go to the boss. Hi, Michael. I'm Andres Martinez, and I apologize that I was running late. But you all got an upgrade in terms of moderating. That was a great conversation. I wanted to ask you about the interplay between the stimulus, which isn't spoken about much on the campaign trail these days, and TARP and the financial rescue package. I feel like today, you know, today is a notable milestone in that the Treasury is selling a big stake in AIG, recouping a lot of that investment, and for the first time getting the federal stake in AIG down below 50%. And that was the one part of TARP that people felt this money's never coming back. So maybe today should be some kind of holiday. But clearly, you know, if stimulus is a tarnished accomplishment, politically in terms of what the administration accomplished, TARP and the, quote, Wall Street bailout, that's far worse, it seems, politically, and cost a lot of people their jobs on the Hill. But to what extent do you feel that the administration's efforts on the stimulus side that your book is about was just, you know, that the brand just became too tarnished because it was part of this overall climate of, you know, bailing people out and, you know, that all of this happened in a kind of a blur, again, for people, as you point out, in real America who can't follow this blow-by-blow. But talk a little bit about the extent to which TARP influenced what happened with stimulus, vice versa. And I know it's kind of a convoluted question, but... No, absolutely. And that relates to the last question, because that's one of the big reasons that they had said no more than $800 billion, too. It was just like, you know, there was just enough is enoughism where it just felt bad, you know, and people and the backlash against TARP was swift and strong. And one of the reasons the stimulus is so unpopular is because people think that's when we bailed out the banks. And what the hell? I'll name names. You know, when I interviewed John Dingle, who... And he was telling me, you know, he was defending the stimulus very, you know, lucidly, but then at one point he said, you know, and when people don't even realize that the whole stimulus is going to get paid back, I was like, that's TARP, you mean the bank bailout. He's like, no, the stimulus. I was like, oh, man. You know, and even Charlie Rangel had the same kind of brain fart, and he rode half this thing, at least on the tax side. So I think it's created a terrible political climate where one of these... And it's one of Obama's problems was like, unlike... I talked some about this in the book where Larry Summers had said, you know, in a way, FDR was lucky. He had three years of depression under Hoover before he took over. Everybody knew it was Hoover's depression. And even... I heard people in the White House talk about, you know, FDR took over in March, you know, before they passed one of those constitutional amendments, then moved it back to January. And even those two months later, there would have been another 1.5 million jobs lost on Bush's wash instead of Obama's. This really created a horrible, you know, the idea that like bailouts plus, you know, this financial earthquake that had hit, but the economic tsunami hadn't hit the shore, that created this horrible political, you know, where Obama was really catching this falling spear. And, you know, that sort of things could have been worse from the beginning turned out to be the, you know, the sort of best argument you can make, which is, as everybody knows, that's a lousy bumper sticker. Substantively, you know, the financial bailout and the Wall Street bailout and the Main Street bailout sort of go hand in hand. And in fact, there's...I also mentioned this kind of cute little story where Tim Geithner says to... says to Christie Romer, Geithner being the sort of big fan of the bank bailout and Christie Romer being much more of a, you know, let's help Main Street too. Geithner says, you know, there's more stimulus in TARP than in the stimulus. And she says she shoots back that there's more bank stabilization in the stimulus than in your bank stabilization. But I think what the larger point of that is that they're both right, in a sense, that by preventing a financial cataclysm, TARP created a lot of stimulus, or certainly anti-stimulus, as I call it in the book, and that by giving consumers some money and doing at least something about their hemorrhaging personal debt situation, the Main Street stimulus and companies as well did help, you know, provide some stability to banks who were being hosed by people not paying them back. So I think politically, you know, substantively and politically, they both worked in the same direction, but they were very different. You know, but substantively, they worked in a very good direction and politically in a very bad direction. You had a question? I have sort of two questions because I don't do anything. I do research. I don't do anything on messaging. I do do something on messaging when it's finished. The first question is whether you think there's been a, when we go back to the carry campaign and the swift boat problem, the mantra is from that experience that it wasn't answered quickly enough and that there's this similar kind of criticism of the Obama messaging thing that he takes a very long time to, or his folks, to respond. And the other sort of link to that thing is the, I did some work on a rather broad assessment of what was going on on one aspect of the stimulus in several, in many states. And the impression I got at the state and local level was irrespective of the party in power that there really was understanding in the administrations and the people who were responsible for implementing the stimulus and appreciation for it. And is there something that is not done properly or adequately about the difference between letting the national media create the message and what's done at the state and local level in media in messaging. I mean, in messaging of what's going on because of people, and you just walk, I mean, you ride down the highways of America and you keep, when it was happening, you keep seeing these signs, this is stimulus money and this is American Recovery Act. And it's out there. The governor has to put up the signs. So I think only 22 states have the signs. Yeah, well, let me get to the first question, was do they respond fast enough? And on the stimulus, they didn't. And there's actually a kind of, I have some funny quotes in there from, I quote Dan Pfeiffer on the record who is, he's now the Obama's communications director. And he has this, I think actually true and legitimate, but also kind of whiny quote about how we had just run this, basically the entire communications team had just been fighting every day for two years over this campaign. And they'd run this marathon and then suddenly they had to do this 800 yard sprint and they didn't know where the bathrooms were and people are telling them that if the Recovery Act doesn't pass in the next couple of weeks, the market's going to crash in other 3,000 points. And we didn't have time to do the kind of strategic meetings. We should have sort of some whiny stuff. But also fair, they weren't kind of, they didn't have their A game together yet. I also tell this story about Obama, like as the message was getting away from him, Obama decides, it's like, all right, we've got to take this thing back. This can't just be about honeybee insurance and mob museums. So he calls up all five of the major network anchors and invites them to do one-on-one interviews in the Oval Office that he's going to talk directly to the American people about stimulus and this is going to be like his first fireside chat, the kind of equivalent. And that morning, Tom Daschle withdrew his nomination to be his health czar. And so all the questions were about Daschle and the big soundbite takeaway was Obama saying, I screwed up, which was not the message they wanted. And again, I think some of these guys in the White House attached a little bit too much importance to that one moment, but I think it is a sort of symbolic moment of them failing to get the message across. Second one, look, like every Republican governor, they all came out, they said, this stimulus sucks, we're not taking the money, this is the death of free enterprise, and then they all took the money. The only one who legitimately made a principled stand against taking the money was Mark Sanford, who is actually kind of, I think he's sort of a hero in my book. I don't know, he's like the principled Republican. He sort of takes the Hoover's Treasury Secretary, Mellon, who had this whole thing about, you know, basically we need to purge the rottenness out of the system. He genuinely, like Sanford genuinely believed that. He said, like, we sort of ought to suck it up and go through our depression and shrink the government to the size it ought to be. And he was very honest about his Republican colleagues who, you know, he said like, you know, suddenly now that they don't have the keys, suddenly they want to shrink government. They sure as heck didn't want to shrink government when they had the keys. But he actually did try to turn down the money, but his Republican state legislature overruled him. And he actually told me that it was such a lonely fight that he's like, I'm not saying that's why I, you know, went walking down the Appalachian Trail, but it was an unbelievably lonely time, very lonely, and I'm like, you know. So I saw he's getting married now, so that's another stimulus achievement, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Right. In the back, yeah. I'm Mark Schmidt. Oh, my new hero. Well, as you know, because I read a little bit about it, my favorite part of your book really has to do with your reporting from within the government agencies, which is really remarkable and a real reminder of how little reporting of that type there is outside of scandal. And I wonder if you could say a little bit more. I mean, you talked a bit about the culture of competition moving into government. But you have really had some wonderful other sections about real turnarounds in agencies and bringing a kind of entrepreneurial culture. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about how far, you know, how much of a real transformation of the executive branch, the administration of government really was triggered by the stimulus or by other things. I mean, there's a very good piece in the post by Suzy Kim about the culture of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, which also has a sort of startup culture. We haven't talked at all about that aspect of the book today. First of all, I say like I'm not related to Mark Schmidt. But he's definitely my new best friend. You wrote something really lovely about the book. I do think that there's certainly the stimulus itself, which there was this recognition right up front where I tell the story about how Joe Biden kind of made this pitch that somebody who has a lot of juice in the White House and is a real people person and can talk to governors and congressmen and mayors and really get this thing moving and cabinet secretaries, somebody ought to be put in charge of this thing. And Obama kind of reads the memo and says like, okay, Joe, go ahead and do it. But there was this recognition by Biden who I think has done a terrific job and everybody in the White House will say, like kind of, I know he's goofy, but he really has set the tone that, and Obama has set the tone, that this money, we can't screw this up, that this is $800 billion that can't get stolen. We are going to be watching it. Steal some other money. And seriously, like before this thing happened, there was the sense that 5% to 7% of it, the trade associations would say, you can expect to be lost to fraud, so far the number has been 0.01% of it. And there really was, I think a lot of this came from this conscious decision that we are watching. We are going to hold you accountable and we are going to take you seriously if you work in government. Like we want you to be making decisions, we want you to make them fast and we want you to make them well and we are going to be judging them. And so I think there was that culture where, and this is also where something like, it's hard to quantify except things like, well, there was no fraud and like if you read the book, shit seems to be working pretty well. But this is where I, you know, interviewing 400 people sort of helps where you really do here again and again that with the stimulus we felt in this agency we were putting our best people on it and there was a real sense of excitement about it. And I do think that then there has been, in the Obama administration, particularly on the anti-waste, anti-fraud part of it, there's a sense like, hey, let's try to bottle this. Let's try to bring it to other parts of what we do. The energy department, which is sort of the bureaucracy that I burrow the deepest into, they brought in a guy from McKinsey to oversee the stimulus and he really tried to change the culture of this sclerotic bureaucracy, which was partly about accountability and partly about empowerment, where we're going to, they have these kind of tag ups every morning where you bring together 100 of the top civil servants in the agency and it was kind of, what did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What obstacles did you run into? How can we fix it? Where it's really a kind of more corporate culture, you can say, but accountability has become this buzzword, but A, by making these programs more about competition, as I discussed earlier, and not just for race to the top, but turning everything into a race to the top, turning lead paint removal programs into a race to the top and building firehouses and broadband and all of these things where you're constantly having to justify what you're doing with taxpayer dollars. I interviewed this guy at this Republican who Ed Rendell put in charge of Pennsylvania's stimulus and he was a businessman and he actually was not a stimulus supporter, but he said that we're going to be spending this money, we're going to do it right, and he told me a story about walking into, I feel bad, I don't want to make these people sound like they're just, doing airy-fairy stuff because it's important stuff, but he went into this domestic violence program and he was asking them about their metrics and how they judge success and that sort of thing. They were like, what? I'm like, what are you talking about? We try to help women. He's like, well, yeah, how many women? And does it work? And I do think it's a little bit ineffable, but I do think that there was a new culture that was put into place through this Recovery Act, partly because it was the most scrutinized federal dollars in history. And there's certainly an awareness in the Obama administration this is something that ought to spread. And then they're trying, I think a lot of it depends on whether he gets re-elected and whether, if he doesn't get re-elected, this is something that Romney, who comes from a corporate culture, sees as something that ought to continue. Just a question about, are there records of kind of a similar transformation when it comes to FDRs, you know, when the New Deal was implemented? Was there a transformation to be had back then, I guess, in these government offices and administrations? Well, it was a very different kind of transformation because that was really the creation of big government. That was sort of making the case that government has a role and so it was much less worry about how this money was going to be spent and much more, let's hire four million people in the winter of 1934 and whether they're, you know, if some of them are digging holes and filling them back in, that's okay. But this was much more of a focus on not just making government, not just making the case for big government because we already got it, but making it work. In the sense that even though it may not be the best stimulus to be, you know, making a list and checking it twice, you know, it would be perfect, you know, you can, wasting money is good stimulus too. But there was this sense, Biden's line was, you know, what he would always say is, if somebody finds out we blew a billion dollars, this thing is gone, gone. And, you know, and I think Selindra turns out to be somewhat of a lesson in that even though the entire Selindra portfolio, you know, the clean energy portfolio is doing fine, we're not going to lose money on that deal. But there was a sense that people are watching that there wasn't in the new deal, that this is like, we've got to make the case that at a time when, you know, people don't think government can run a, you know, a two-car funeral, that we're going to try to make a case that government can work. And of course the irony is, I think, they showed that government can work, and the lesson that everybody took out of it is that government can't work. Yes, right over there. Hi, Robert Shreda, international investor. I'm a member of one of the larger groups of economists here in Washington. And my question is, beyond the media, what your views are in terms of the profession of the economists in terms of being able to analyze and offer good insight into this problem? Specifically, I haven't read your book yet, but do you talk about such things as the multiplier effect as a result of some of the spending and the productivity pop or even the long-term productivity effects? Do you find that the economics profession has been able to step up and offer some assistance to say, well, this is what's happened to similar programs in the past, this is what we might expect from these in the future? Absolutely. And in fact, there was, you know, they had a lot, this was another big difference with the New Deal, is that the New Deal, they were really flying blind. And, you know, FDR had just campaigned on a balanced budget. And, you know, there was this guy in England who had these kind of crazy ideas that we ought to spend money and, you know, blow up the orthodoxy of the day, but he wasn't really listening to Keynes that much. And now we've got to, you know, there's a lot of work done before this where you had very, in fact, in January, oh, nine, no, January, oh, eight, January, oh, eight or no, nine. God, I'm going to forget when the Brookings, the Brookings had just come out, it was oh, eight, I think, where Brookings came out with some work on multipliers and Moody's Economy.com came out with some work and the CBO where there was a really, a lot of very solid information about what the, you know, about what kind of things work and that was taken very seriously by the people who were making these decisions. The, you know, in terms of, you know, unemployment benefits, food stamps, refundable tax credits, but not, you know, the tax credits that go to poorer people as opposed to, you know, richer people who are more likely to save it. That public works, economists had a very strong feeling that it wouldn't be spent right away but also a very strong feeling that it's good stimulus when it happens and that was taken into account by these people who said, well, we're going to, this is a really deep, this is going to be, we're going to need stimulus for a couple years. We have room for a different kind of stimulus. Obama in January, oh, eight, came out with a stimulus plan that was by far the most short-term stimulus of all the presidential candidates. It was a kind of textbook Keynesian short-term stimulus and he had actually gotten into a debate with Hillary during one of the, I think it was a debate in South Carolina where she was explaining, you know, people were saying, like, how come there's no green energy in your short-term stimulus plan? This was when it was a very small downturn and he said, because that's not stimulus. You know, that's pushing an agenda. Obviously, as this thing got bigger, he realized that it would make sense to push an agenda as well as the short-term stimulus. But I think there was a lot of serious economic thinking, you know, by guys like Larry Summers and Jason Furman and, you know, and Christie Romer who were very steeped in the academic literature and, you know, Christie's a depression scholar. They took it very seriously. They may have underestimated the difficulty of, you know, Jared Bernstein's always talking about how it turns out that Keynesian stimulus is that they never taught us in grad school about how to sell Keynesian stimulus. I mean, that was something that I think the economics profession where, as Christie says, like it wasn't Keynesian stimulus, it's not some kind of like, you know, newfangled gene therapy for a downturn. It's like antibiotics. It's really got a fair amount of across the political spectrum, you know, well, people can disagree about the makeup and, you know, how much of it and how to do it. There's a basic idea that, like, you know, you're going to provide some stimulus with a stimulus plan. And like I said, in 2008, every Democratic and Republican economist and presidential candidate was okay with the notion of Keynesian stimulus. It was only something happened on January 20th, 2009 that suddenly made it controversial. I don't know, it was cold day, seemed to recall it. Somebody raised their hand and went like that. That seemed to debate, change some of the debate politically, but I saw the University of Chicago did a survey of economists and I think something like only 4% that said that the Recovery Act did not create jobs or boost growth. So I think, you know, within the profession, there are still differences, but the Post did a sort of meta-study of what I think now there have been 15 empirical and non-empirical studies of the actual Recovery Act and 14 of the statistically significant ones have found that basically it helped. And the one that didn't was John Taylor, who as you know is a very prominent Republican economist and his data, as everybody has pointed out, showed just as well, you know, you could just use that data to argue that the stimulus should have been bigger. So I hope that answers the question. Last two questions. Thank you. This was a fascinating discussion. To follow up on the question from Mark on the long-term effects, I was wondering there has been a lot of discussion in the policy circles about the increase in inequality that has happened over the last several decades, not only in the United States, but also across the industrialized world. And I was wondering to what extent you think the Recovery Act long-term effects might counteract that trend because it seems that we have some conflicting indications in the short term. On the one hand, there was the recent article in the New York Times about poverty in the magazine by Paul Toff, I think, about the fact that the social spending, social program spending has blunted the sort of poverty increase that might have been expected. But on the other hand, there's the National Employment Law Project study that shows that a lot of the new jobs being created are actually not so good. So there still seems to be a continued bifurcation in the labor market. What can you say about that? Thank you. Well, the first thing I should say is that I should have pointed out in the last minute, like I'm not an economist. And actually, I think it's a legitimate criticism of my book probably that I don't get as deep into some of these inequality issues as I should, because it is a big question of our time and it's certainly a legitimate thing that Obama has to answer for in ways that probably he hasn't adequately so far. I will say the initial stimulus, this also falls into the things could have been worse rubric that nobody likes to hear. But there have been studies that shown that just the direct transfers prevented 7 million people from falling below the poverty line and another 32 million people who are below the poverty line obviously made them less poor. I like talking about this homelessness prevention program that was started by the, it was $20 million in the budget before they had done a pilot project in 2008. It seemed to work pretty well. So somebody said like, what the hell? Let's put $1.5 billion into this thing and take it national. Nobody has ever heard of this program. I can guarantee you. And basically, what people have found is that if you end up, if you become homeless, that's very bad. It creates all sorts of social problems and expensive social problems in the shelter system it's really bad. You don't want to become homeless in the first place. So this was this idea like, well, if people are on the brink of homelessness, why don't we pay some of their back rent or their utility bill or their moving costs and see how that works. And the long story short is that it served 1.2 million people. And I actually went and talked to the people who did the program in Miami where I think it's 0.87% of them have shown up in the homelessness system. So there's been almost no recidivism. And it's impossible to know how many would have otherwise. But if half of those people had ended up on the streets, the homelessness population would have doubled. And instead, homelessness actually declined slightly during the worst recession since the Great Depression. So I think that's an example of how, you know, is that creating great jobs for those people? No, but things, you know, that could have created a real problem. There was an effort to sort of make the tax code a little fairer through, you know, making work pay, things like that. Some of the other refundable tax credits, which were definitely an attempt to redress some of the imbalances that showed up during the Bush tax cut era. And there was, and this I wouldn't want to judge to what extent this has worked. But Obama did have this, you know, like I say in the book, that he had this very distinct theory of the case. And the Recovery Act sort of put it into practice. But the theory was that these things that kind of liberals think are terrible, like, oh, it's terrible that our schools suck. It's terrible that health care costs are too high. It's terrible that we're broiling the planet. And it's terrible that our tax code is so unfair and our infrastructure is falling apart. That if you deal with those problems, that those are economic problems as well as moral problems. That in fact, we need a more educated workforce if we want to compete. That clean energy industries or really are can provide good jobs in the future. That our health care costs are dragging, that when a GM car has seven times the health care cost built into it as a Japanese car, that that really is dragging down our economy. And that when people don't have money, when we have this kind of inequality, just as FDR, the post-war economy really was driven by the middle class, having a consumer-driven economy, that we need to sort of have that kind of people with good jobs so that they can spend money and will all benefit. And that infrastructure and research are a part of that. So that was sort of the theory of the case. And I wouldn't want to judge on the inequality spectrum how well that's worked, but he has followed through on that agenda. And I do, when I go to these factories, the first thing I always, you know, these sort of, you know, advanced battery factories where we created a brand new advanced battery factory industry out of thin air for electric vehicles. And I've been in some of these factories and the first thing I always notice is, where are all the people? You know, this is not creating that many jobs. But then when you talk to the people, you notice, well, it is creating some jobs and they're really good jobs. And these people, and that if you don't have these jobs, there's the danger that the innovation is going to follow the manufacturing abroad. And certainly the, you know, these guys are going and eating at the coffee shop across the street and et cetera, and you know, they're gassing up their car or, you know, whatever it is. So this is a long winded way of saying they did think about this stuff. And I guess we'll see, right? I mean, certainly nobody's happy with the state of the economy in 2012. Last question for you. To, when we, when Obamacare, as it's been derisively called past, because of the way it was mischaracterized and criticized and the way it was put together, for almost two years we saw Democrats and also others who just thought they would benefit from it say, well, it will eventually be better understood and become popular once it takes effect and people really see what it is. I was at the convention, the Democratic Convention in Charlotte and for the first time in almost two years congressional Democrats as well as the President's campaign openly embraced it after either ignoring it or running away from it. And I wondered to what extent it's possible or to what extent should and could the same arguments be made for the stimulus package. That is, your research and your reporting suggests over the long term it will be better understood. It will be, it will have long-term payoffs. But what about even just in the next eight weeks of the campaign, do you think there's any potential for explaining it better, for taking credit for it? I think after my book becomes a runaway bestseller. I'm chink, everybody will understand. It made the list this week. But honestly, no. You do hear him talk now about middle-class tax cuts and Pell grants and that we've doubled renewable energy. You know, I'm the guy in the back saying, because of the stimulus! It's because of the stimulus! They don't say the word stimulus, but they are at least talking about the achievements in it a little bit more than they did. I wrote a piece, you know, and when the book first came out, he tried to flack it in every different way. So I did a piece about the five myths of the stimulus for the Washington Post. I don't know if you guys saw it. But that guy living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue saw it. And he started giving his, he was giving some of his political guys a hard time about it. He was like, oh, this is great! I'm going to put this in my stump speech and say, oh, don't talk about the stimulus! Which they seem to think that cake is baked. But, you know, you're not going to hear them talking about the new, new deal. It seems like alas. You know, since I feel like, since I'm getting everybody's trashing me as a shill anyway, I might as well get some shill points. But no. But you guys can go, you guys can go spread the word. And with that, we are selling the book outside. But thank you so much for coming today. And thank you all for being here. Our next New America Delvin to 12 event is going to be on September 18th, and we're going to be dealing with the topic of voter ID law. And we've actually got a bunch of students coming in from News 21, which is this student journalism organization that these students have been reporting on the subject for the whole summer, and so they're going to report on their findings about voter ID law and how much it's disenfranchising Americans here September 18th. So keep a look out for that on the website. Thank you all so much for coming.