The Politics of Impatience

BY JUDAH BELLIN

The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, by Michael Grunwald (Simon & Schuster, 528 pp., $28)

Journalist Michael Grunwald wants to convince readers that it’s not President Obama’s record that matters but his ideas.
In The New New Deal, his book on Obama’s stimulus plan, Grunwald argues that because the stimulus will transform American industry in the long run, it doesn’t matter that the immediate employment situation has improved so little.
The “change” that Obama promised, contends Grunwald, “is a direction, not a destination.”
Put differently: the stimulus was “only partly about stimulus” and “also about metamorphosis.”
Who needs results when you’re busy shaping the future?
Administration officials certainly saw the stimulus the way Grunwald does. “Stimulus czar” Matt Rogers, for instance, said of biotech investments that “we don’t know which of these approaches will work. . . . We don’t care.”

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Charles Kesler

I Am the Change:

City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson interviews Charles Kesler about his new book