139 Democrats had criticized Bush: Devlin Barrett, “Dear Taxpayer: This Letter Cost You $42 million,” Associated Press, March 7, 2008.
140 As the team reported in a four-page memo: “Issues in Congressional Discussions on Economic Recovery,” December 20, 2008, memo provided to the author. David Obey was the only member of Congress the team met; otherwise, its meetings were all with Democratic staffers. There were a few discordant notes, like “skepticism about the magnitude of our smart grid numbers,” “somewhat more distance” on education, and “strong desire” to include a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax.
141 “We have communicated our willingness”: This memo from Gary Myrick was reported at the time. Jackie Calmes, “As Outlook Dims, Obama Expands Recovery Plans,” New York Times, December 20, 2008.
142 The seventy-four-year-old chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee: Michael Grunwald, “Bridges to Nowhere,” Time, August 6, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1650149,00.html.
143 “The biggest issue is less the reaction to our topline numbers”: “Issues in Congressional Discussions on Economic Recovery,” December 20, 2008.
144 The U.S. Conference of Mayors identified $180 billion: “Main Street Economic Recovery,” U.S. Conference of Mayors, December 2, 2008, http://www.uptown-indy.com/pdf/Main_Street_Economic_Recovery%20_Plan_120308.pdf.
145 he went on Fox to warn: Neil Cavuto interview with Evan Bayh, February 3, 2009.
146 Schiliro was spreading the word: Mike Allen, “Big Tax Cuts in the Works,” Politico, January 5, 2009, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/17039.html.
7. The Party of No
147 Just a few years earlier: Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, One Party Country (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2006); Thomas Byrne Edsall, Building Red America (New York: Basic Books, 2007).
148 Now publishers were rushing out titles: Sidney Blumenthal, The Strange Death of Republican America (New York: Union Square Press, 2007); James Carville, 40 More Years: How Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).
149 “If the Purpose of the Majority”: Pete Sessions, “Who Wants to Be in the Majority?: A Blueprint for Victory,” January 2009; copy of this PowerPoint provided to the author. The New York Times first reported on it: Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny, “Democrats Outrun by a 2-Year G.O.P. Comeback Plan,” New York Times, November 3, 2010.
150 Cole had been a political consultant: Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald, “A New Pitchman—And a New Pitch,” Washington Post, May 9, 2007.
151 Five of the forty-one surviving Republican senators: Christopher (Kit) Bond of Missouri, Sam Brownback of Kansas, George Voinovich of Ohio, Mel Martinez of Florida, and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire (after some drama) would all announce their retirements soon.
152 He had dubbed himself the Abominable No-Man: Edwin Chen, “Free Speech Will Pay Heavy Price Under Campaign Finance Reform, Key Foe Says,” Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1997.
153 he stuck to his talking points: A copy of the talking points was provided to the author.
154 the CBO had just tripled its deficit projection: “The Budget and Economic Outlook: 2009 to 2019,” Congressional Budget Office, January 2009, http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9957/01-07-Outlook.pdf.
155 “We thought—correctly, I think”: Joshua Green, “Strict Obstructionist,” The Atlantic, January 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/strict-obstructionist/8344/.
156 McConnell slyly questioned why America needed 600,000 new government jobs: McConnell interview, This Week, ABC, January 4, 2009, http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=6573506.
157 Gregg himself had just published an op-ed: Judd Gregg, “How to Make Sure the Stimulus Works,” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2009.
158 “I do not work for Barack Obama”: Bob Cusack, J. Taylor Rushing, and Hugo Gurdon, “Reid: ‘I Don’t Work for Obama,’” The Hill, January 6, 2009.
159 “May be hard to enact without significant consensus”: Memo to Rahm Emanuel, “State Fiscal Relief Plans,” December 27, 2008, draft provided to the author.
160 “We cannot depend on government alone”: Obama speech, January 8, 2009, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=85361.
161 “To me it looks a little bit like trickle-down”: Elana Schor, “Harkin Fears ‘Trickle-Down’ Stimulus,” Talking Points Memo, January 8, 2009, http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/harkin_fears_trickle-down_stimulus.php.
162 the headlines were all about friendly fire: Peter Baker and David M. Herszenhorn, “Senate Allies Fault Obama on Stimulus,” New York Times, January 8, 2009; Steve Holland, “Democrats Make Clear They Will Guard Turf,” Reuters, January 10, 2009; Shailagh Murray and Paul Kane, “Democratic Congress Shows Signs It Will Not Bow to Obama,” Washington Post, January 11, 2009.
163 Oberstar upped his request to $85 billion: “A Proposal to Rebuild America by Investing in Transportation and Environmental Infrastructure,” December 12, 2008, http://www.dot.ca.gov/fedliaison/documents/Rebuild_America_proposal.pdf.
164 Mark Zandi warned that the economy was “shutting down”: Democratic Steering and Policy Committee hearing on the economy, January 7, 2007.
165 the Romer-Bernstein report: Romer and Bernstein, “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan.”
166 Most analysts believe Romer and Bernstein came close to the delta: Romer and Bernstein predicted the Recovery Act would boost GDP by approximately 3.6 percent and employment by 3.3 million to 4.1 million jobs compared to the no-action case. Private economic forecasting firms have said the boost has been 2.1 percent to 3.8 percent of GDP and roughly 2.5 million jobs: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/cea_8th_arra_report_final_draft.pdf.
167 “We’ll be lucky if the unemployment rate is below double digits”: Michael M. Grynbaum, “In String of Bad News, Omens of a Long Recession,” New York Times, December 7, 2008.
168 Several days after Romer-Bernstein hit the streets: Macroeconomic Advisers changed its initial estimate of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2009 from –1.3 percent to –4.3 percent. Jon Hilsenrath and Jonathan Weisman, “As Economy Falters, Doubts on Obama Plan Mount,” Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2009.
8. “Wow. We Can Actually Do It.”
169 The big-ticket items in the Recovery Act: The initial estimates for the Recovery Act included $141 billion for state aid, $116 billion for the Making Work Pay tax cut, and $40 billion for unemployment insurance, according to CBO and Joint Committee on Taxation estimates from February 2009. CBO cost estimate, February 13, 2009, http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9989/hrlconference.pdf; Joint Committee on Taxation cost estimate, February 12, 2009, http://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=1172.
170 aid to poor families with high propensities to spend: Mark Zandi testimony before the House Small Business Committee, July 24, 2008, http://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/Small%20Business_7_24_08.pdf.
171 the transition team secured hefty increases: The line items for the safety net included $20 billion for food stamps, $2.3 billion for child care, $2 billion for rental assistance, $4.7 billion for the Earned Income Tax Credit, and $25 billion to subsidize 65 percent of the COBRA health insurance premiums for laid-off workers. Other investments in Obama priorities included $360 million for construction at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, $2 billion for community health clinics, $1.3 billion for Amtrak (not including the high-speed rail funding), $4 billion for public housing renovations, $145 million for floodplain easements, $1.1 billion for Early Head Start, $1 billion for preventive medicine, and $200 million for Americorps.
172 stimulus would be one blade of the scissors: Eric Pooley, The Climate War: True Believers, Power Brokers, and the Fight to Save the Earth (New York: Hyperion, 2010), p. 313.
173 more than Bush had managed to spend in eigh
t years: The Bush administration spent $2.5 billion on clean coal programs. “Fact Sheet: DOE to Demonstrate Cutting-Edge Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technology at Multiple FutureGen Clean Coal Projects,” Department of Energy, June 24, 2008, http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/powersystems/futuregen/FutureGen_Fact_Sheet_2008.06.24.pdf.
174 the Energy Department’s loan guarantee program: The federal government has given out loan guarantees for years, but the Energy Department’s program only began in 2005, and it hadn’t closed a single deal before Obama took office. Normally, the government promises to repay all or most of a recipient’s obligations to private investors in case of a default; after the Great Recession, though, credit was so tight that the federal government usually ended up loaning the money directly. The Energy Department’s loan office oversaw three programs. The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program, for factories making fuel-efficient cars, was separate from the Recovery Act. The 1703 program for “innovative” clean-energy technologies that had never been commercialized before received new credit subsidies under the Recovery Act. The 1705 program for more mature clean-energy technologies was created by the Recovery Act. Matt Rogers, the department’s stimulus czar, oversaw all three programs until November 2009, when Jonathan Silver was hired to run the loan office.
175 “The apparent haste in recommending the project”: Many of the Solyndra documents released by the Obama administration have been made available online by House Republicans at http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9090; http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=9000; and http://energycommerce.house.gov/hearings/hearingdetail.aspx?NewsID=8897. The White House has released more Solyndra documents that were made available only in hard copies.
176 The Census Bureau needed to hire: The Recovery Act provided $1 billion to the Census Bureau, $650 million for the analog-to-digital television transition, $730 million to the Small Business Administration, and $1.2 billion for the Labor Department’s summer jobs program.
177 The idea was to keep stormwater out of overwhelmed sewers: Grunwald, “Smart Streets.” Energy efficiency is attractive for similar reasons; it’s cheaper and easier to reduce demand for electricity than it is to expand the supply of power with new plants. Similarly, water conservation is cheaper than new reservoirs; drug treatment programs are cheaper than new prisons; and congestion pricing, incentives for carpooling and telecommuting, and other public policies designed to reduce traffic tend to work better than building new highway lanes.
178 he left most of the details to Congress: The Recovery Act actually included $27 billion for health IT, but the CBO estimated that wiring medical offices would save the government $7 billion in health care costs within ten years, so it came out to $20 billion.
179 mandating adoption of the Veterans Administration’s computer system: In The Promise, Jonathan Alter suggested the Recovery Act should have mandated that all health IT programs use the VA’s VISTA system. But there was no need for such heavy-handed government intrusion. Instead, the Recovery Act set up a partnership with the industry to promote “interoperability,” to make sure the various IT systems will be able to communicate with each other, and a process for government certification of eligible products. That way doctors and hospitals can decide if they want VISTA, and private firms can try to develop something better. The Department of Health and Human Services has already certified more than six hundred products.
180 private disincentives to build a network: Nobody wanted to invest in a fax machine before anyone they communicated with had a fax machine. Similarly, doctors didn’t want to be early adopters of health IT if they wouldn’t have colleagues to share data with. The Recovery Act helped solve this classic network problem by bringing almost the entire country on board at once.
181 Summers had spent one of the most traumatic hours of his life: Lawrence Summers remarks at Department of Health and Human Services event, December 8, 2010, video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpZBF7FKk2M.
182 Republican health care propagandist Betsy McCaughey wrote a column: “Ruin Your Health with the Obama Stimulus Plan,” Bloomberg, February 9, 2009. McCaughey wrote a famously dishonest slam of the Clinton health plan, “No Exit,” that The New Republic later retracted.
183 Rush Limbaugh began trashing: “Outrage over Socialized Health Care Hidden Inside Porkulus Bill,” The Rush Limbaugh Show, February 10, 2009, http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2009/02/10/outrage_over_socialized_health_care_hidden_inside_porkulus_bill.
184 America’s freight rail was the envy of the world: Michael Grunwald, “Can High-Speed Rail Get on Track?” Time, July 19, 2010.
185 After David Obey’s tantrum: Steven Brill has already written a compelling book about the genesis of Race to the Top and its impact on the national debate over public education: Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).
186 a short list compiled by ProPublica: Michael Grabell and Christopher Weaver, “In the Stimulus Bill: An Earmark by Any Other Name,” ProPublica, February 5, 2009, http://www.propublica.org/article/welcome-in-the-stimulus-bill-an-earmark-by-any-other-name.
187 about $150 billion to long-term change: That includes about $90 billion for clean energy, $30 billion for health IT and other transformative health programs, $8 billion for education reform, $8 billion for high-speed rail, $7 billion for broadband, and $7 billion for unemployment modernization. There’s also TIGER, homelessness prevention, green infrastructure, and other assorted innovations scattered around the Recovery Act.
9. Shirts and Skins
188 lists of dubious-sounding provisions: The provisions were part of a “Wasteful Spending Resource” maintained by GOP Senate aides, including a running list of “Top Ten Stimulus Boondoggles from Congressional Democrats.” Many of these showed up in a CNN.com list of Republican complaints about the Recovery Act: “What GOP Leaders Deem Wasteful in Senate Stimulus Bill,” CNN.com, February 2, 2009, http://articles.cnn.com/2009-02-02/politics/gop.stimulus.worries_1_green-buildings-homeland-security-summer-job-programs?_s=PM:POLITICS.
189 Eric Cantor claimed that it would direct $300,000 to a Miami sculpture garden: PolitiFact rated this claim “Pants on Fire.” “Does the Stimulus Package Really Include $300,000 for a Sculpture Garden?”, PolitiFact, January 23, 2009. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/jan/26/eric-cantor/does-stimulus-package-really-include-300000-sculpt/.
190 a previously uncontroversial disaster aid program: Michael Hiltzik, “Republican Buzz on Stimulus Plan Has No Sting,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 2009.
191 “In fact, there’s no money in the bill for mice”: PolitiFact rated this claim “False.” “No money in the stimulus for San Francisco mice,” PolitiFact, February 13, 2009, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2009/feb/13/mike-pence/no-money-stimulus-san-francisco-mice/.
192 Republicans kept harping on the mouse anyway: S. A. Miller, “GOP Hits Pelosi for Mouse Funds,” Washington Times, July 10, 2009.
193 The CBO concluded that the family planning money: “Estimated Effect on Direct Spending and Revenues of H.R. 3162, the Children’s Health and Medicare Protection Act, for the Rules Committee,” Congressional Budget Office, August 1, 2007, http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/85xx/doc8519/hr3162.pdf.
194 It sounded like a crass giveaway to the Hollywood elite: The movie industry was excluded from the bonus depreciation tax break when it was first created in 2004 at the insistence of Bill Thomas, the Republican House Ways and Means chairman at the time. Thomas objected to the Motion Picture Association of America’s hiring of Dan Glickman, a former Clinton cabinet secretary. “Senate Votes Down Repatriation, Hollywood Provisions,” CongressDaily, February 4, 2009.
195 The conservative Washington Times even trumpeted: Stephen Dinan and S. A. Miller, “EXCLUSIVE: Stimulus Has Plum for Lawmaker’s Son,” Washington Times, February 29, 2009.
&nbs
p; 196 GOP leaders cherry-picked a preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis: “Estimated Cost of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 as Provided on the Appropriation Committee Website on January 15, 2009,” http://www.tampabay.com/universal/politifact/files/recoveryactsummary.pdf; “REPORT: TV Media Cited Disputed CBO ‘Report’ at Least 81 Times in Past Six Days,” Think-Progress, January 26, 2009, http://thinkprogress.org/media/2009/01/26/35288/report-cbo-tv/.
197 the CBO confirmed that in an actual report: CBO cost estimate for ARRA conference report, February 13, 2009, http://www.cbo.gov/publication/41762.
198 The Associated Press ran an “analysis”: “Analysis: Stimulus Bill That’s Not All Stimulating,” Associated Press, January 31, 2009.
199 cable networks interviewed Republican lawmakers: “REPORT: GOP Lawmakers Outnumber Democratic Lawmakers 2 to 1 in Stimulus Debate on Cable News,” Think-Progress, January 28, 2009, http://thinkprogress.org/media/2009/01/28/35450/cable-news-stimulus/. Despite the report being done by liberal blog ThinkProgress, Senate Republican staffers touted the results in a February 5, 2009, email to reporters with the headline: “GOP Message Resonates with America.”
200 environmentalists attacked a provision: “Stop Senate’s $50 Billion Bailout to the Nuclear Industry,” Friends of the Earth press release, http://action.foe.org/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=26528. I often bang my spoon on my high chair about the impossible economics of new nuclear power. Michael Grunwald, “Nuclear’s Comeback: Still No Energy Panacea,” Time, December 31, 2008; Michael Grunwald, “The Real Cost of U.S. Nuclear Power,” Time, March 25, 2011.
201 White House officials had encouraged him to add to the drumbeat: “Cooper: Obama Staff Encouraged Defiance of Pelosi,” Politico, February 3, 2009, http://www.politico.com/blogs/glennthrush/0209/Cooper_Obama_staff_encouraged_defiance_of_Pelosi.html.
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