The New New Deal isn't just another book about the White House or Congress. It tells the story of what happens when laws are passed and governing begins.

What's the best book about the Obama administration, particularly on domestic policy? A few months ago, I would have recommended Noam Scheiber's The Escape Artists, but The New New Deal, by Michael Grunwald of Time, is not only the best book about the administration and its immediate challenges, but perhaps the only one that will (and should) continue to be read long after 2016. This post isn't a full review of the book (for that, I recommend Michael Cohen in The Guardian, but others are forthcoming) – rather, I want to highlight two aspects of the book that both made me feel a little guilty and got me thinking.

The narrative takes place in three locations: at the White House, in Congress as it interacts with the White House over the stimulus, and deep in the executive branch of government. Grunwald is very good on the drama in the White House, as economic advisors including Larry Summers, Christina Romer, and Jared Bernstein struggled to find a formula to contain the economic disaster that was also politically viable in an environment where neither politicians nor the public fully appreciated the depth of the crisis or the logic of Keynesian stimulus. If his book has none of the contrived Oval Office melodrama of Ron Suskind's Confidence Men, it's because Grunwald understands the subject, and thus knows that the range of options – and the range of real disagreement -- was not that wide.

He amply demonstrates that the great alternative-universe fantasy -- in which the stimulus could have been much, much larger and only political malpractice held it back – is exactly that, a fantasy. The miracle is that the economic stimulus, even if inadequate to fully restore the economy's lost output, was as large as it was, and managed to contain such a multitude of new ideas. Nonetheless, Grunwald acknowledges and digs deeply into the errors that the White House made, such as asking Romer and Bernstein to put forth a projection of unemployment rates with and without the stimulus – which may have been accurate in estimating the difference between the two, but not the overall employment picture.

The New New Deal also shines in its accounting of the legislative response, particularly the Republican opposition to the stimulus -- or, more correctly, to Obama. Grunwald offers a good model for journalists that it's possible to do more than just transcribe something like, “Senator X said he opposed the stimulus because it didn't contain enough tax cuts and infrastructure spending.” When a politician's stated positions make no sense and are glaringly inconsistent, a real journalist can say just that. His parsing of Senator Judd Gregg's shifting logic on the stimulus as he flirted with becoming Obama's Secretary of Commerce is masterful, as is his interview with former Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, a moderate Republican whose amiable rationales make even less sense than those of conservatives.

But The New New Deal made me feel guilty in two big ways. First, I've on occasion made the argument that progressives don't really have an adequate set of new ideas, especially about the future of the economy. But as Grunwald shows, not only are there ideas, but many of them are being put into place as we speak, from the Race to the Top education reforms to the birth of an American solar energy and battery industries to the mundane work of weatherization of millions of homes and businesses to save energy. I didn't fully appreciate the scope of the changes to the Unemployment Insurance system, for example. It's far from sufficient to offset the lost potential from the recession; there's a lot more to be done to rebuild the foundations of a broad and secure middle class, and some of it can't be done by government. But the germ of the ideas that will build the future are there.

Why has it been so easy to overlook that? That's the second point on which I feel guilty. Like most writers about public affairs, I tend to focus somewhat on electoral politics and on legislative politics and policy. Most media coverage is grossly overweighted toward electoral politics – that's why there are 15,000 reporters in Tampa to cover a fully scripted non-event. But even those of us who try to focus more on policy and legislation often overlook the big third dimension, which is government. Virtually nothing is written about the actual implementation of policy in the executive branch or in the states. Newspaper coverage is limited to a watchdog role that seeks out stories like the failed loan to Solyndra, which is how that one failure (which Grunwald shows was already underway in the last days of the Bush administration, under an existing loan program) could become the proxy for the entire stimulus, or as they call it in Tampa, the “failed stimulus.” Most federal agencies have no journalists at all covering them on a daily basis, other than reporters for specialized publications and industry newsletters.

While there are books comparable to Grunwald's about legislation (The Bill, by Steve Waldman, about the early Clinton public service and education initiatives, Showdown at Gucci Gulch, about the 1986 tax reform, and the classroom classic, The Dance of Legislation, by Eric Redman, which is about the 1970s), very few continue to look at what happened in government after the legislation passed. The richest sections of Grunwald's book open up the internal politics of government: one great set piece tells the story of the Department of Energy's office responsible for administering weatherization assistance for low-income families, one that had been a “turkey farm” (a term commonly used in public administration to refer to an unimportant office to which useless employees are assigned) and couldn't even get funds out the door. Given an impossible assignment in the stimulus – to weatherize 600,000 homes – an entepreneurial young leader, Claire Broido Johnson, turned the office around and exceeded the goal.

Such stories, along with accounts of the ARPA-E clean-energy research program and the Race to the Top education program, show that the Obama administration is changing government in ways that go much further than the “Reinventing Government” initiatives of the Clinton-Gore era, which focused mainly on government's relation to citizens, who would be treated more like customers. Creative, ambitious leadership is encouraged, and real competitions, like Race to the Top, are replacing the formula- or earmark-funded programs of the past. It took a while to get started (which is why some of it was ineffective as short-term Keynesian stimulus), but its long-term effects on both government and the economy are likely to be profound.

To restore confidence in government, it is necessary to do all these things – to make government more responsive, imaginative, tough on failure but supportive of promising ideas. But it won't do any good if people don't know about it, and the phrase “failed stimulus” goes unchallenged. The New New Deal is not only one of the two best books ever written about government (the other is Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner), but an acute reminder to every journalist, political writer and political analyst to pay more attention to real stuff of government, which doesn't happen at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

This week's numbers: 51%; 85%; 2.3%; 87%; 62%

51%... is a diminished number. That’s how many Americans were part of the middle class in 2011, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s down 10% since 1971 and represents the only way the U.S. has slimmed down in the middle since then.

85%... is a struggling number. That’s how many middle class Americans say their lifestyle is getting harder to maintain. Keeping up with the Joneses presents new challenges when the Joneses are underemployed and underwater on their mortgage.

2.3%... is a middling number. That’s how much the median net worth of middle class households has grown since 1983. The trickle-down effect Republicans started touting around then has turned out to be an awfully slow drip.

87%... is a bountiful number. That’s how much the median net worth of the wealthiest households has grown during the same period. Instead of lifting all boats, the rising tide seems to be lifting the luxury yachts and capsizing the canoes.

62%... is a frustrated number. That’s how many middle class Americans blame Congress for their hardships. But policymakers haven't completely ignored the problem; they’ve spent years discussing how their opponents aren’t doing anything about it.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

On the 77th anniversary of Social Security, we're celebrating what has made the program so important and why it continues to be vital today. Mark Schmitt lauds it for its ability to provide security throughout tectonic shifts in our economy and society. Read the rest of our coverage here.

If Franklin D. Roosevelt rejoined the living tomorrow, he probably wouldn't recognize Social Security, his greatest domestic legacy. That might sound like something a critic or skeptic of the program would say, as if it had broken faith with Roosevelt's vision or expanded far beyond its original intent.

But, in fact, what Roosevelt would see would be Social Security's greatest virtue: its adaptability to changing circumstances. Social Security has survived, thrived, and continued to provide a base level of economic security not only through big macroeconomic shifts (such as the inflation of the 1970s) but also the transformations and uncertainties in our individual and family lives. That adaptability and continuous reexamination and improvement is the quality most in keeping with the experimental, pragmatic nature of the New Deal.

Between 1935 and 2000, there were 30 major legislative changes to Social Security, roughly one every two years, under Republican and Democratic administrations. In 1939, it expanded its focus from the individual worker to the family, adding benefits for surviving spouses and young children. In 1950, it expanded to cover domestic and farm workers, whose omission was the atrocious compromise FDR had made to secure the support of Southern conservatives. In successive changes from 1954 through 1960, a disability program was created, and in the 1970s, benefits were indexed to inflation. Changes in 1977 and 1983 adjusted the financing of the program, changing the formula for benefits to reduce costs and build up more of a reserve (the Trust Fund) so that future retirees financed some of their own benefits. In 2000, the earnings test for Social Security recipients was eliminated. And while Social Security was created with the assumption of a male breadwinner, over 77 years it has been adjusted to account for the changing role of women in the workforce and the family.

The point of this history is a reminder that Social Security is not a fixed, unchanging thing, a jewel of the New Deal to be worshipped. Rather, it is an incredibly adaptive, responsive structure on which we've been able to build several different forms of economic and family security and adjust to radical changes in the economy, family, industry, education, and expectations over the years.

It's become routine to say that Social Security is an industrial age program that's ill suited, or at least needs to be modernized, to deal with information age challenges, but it's telling that this cliché never gets to specifics. It's true that the current era presents dramatic new challenges to economic security: household debt far larger than in the 1930s, 1950s, or even the 1980s (when most households didn't even have access to consumer credit); the rapid decline since 1979 in the number of defined-benefit pension plans; the disappearance of lifetime employment at a single employer; and, most recently, the high rates of long-term unemployment among people in their late 50s and early 60s. But for almost every one of these changes, there's an answer within Social Security that's as good as any other. We could address the insecurity around pensions by creating a universal 401(k) account, but we could do exactly the same thing, with far less complexity and hassle, simply by expanding Social Security. We could construct some new form of economic security for those who have lost their jobs in their late 50s and may never work again – or, as James K. Galbraith has proposed, we could make it less costly for people to take Social Security at age 62 (which a majority of recipients do anyway) and open up opportunities for younger workers.

There are also liberals who hold the position “never touch Social Security.” They, too, should recognize the record of adaptability and change throughout the history of the program. There are bad changes to the program (such as an abrupt increase in the eligibility age) and less bad ones. But one way or another, it's worth putting Social Security on a path that won't require a significant cut in benefits, or hike in payroll taxes, in 15 or 20 years. I'm not endorsing any specific plan here, but just pointing out that resisting any and all changes to Social Security is really a betrayal of the program's greatest strength.

There are programs that really are locked into a particular era and model of employment. Unemployment Insurance, for example, reflects some of the assumptions of the industrial era economy, such as a business cycle in which dips last about 26 weeks and workers return to their previous employer. But Social Security has a seamless versatility that has made it adaptable to all the massive shifts in the economy and our society since 1935. That, rather than any specific component of the program, is its greatest virtue and the reason that Social Security will endure. 

Mark Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Mitt Romney aired an ad last summer titled "Bump in the Road." It attacked President Obama's record on mass unemployment by linking it to a comment he made about there being bumps in the road to economic recovery. A group of people stood on a road in a desert, holding signs explaining their years of unemployment, their student debts, and their struggling families (something not dissimilar to the We Are the 99% Tumblr that started later that year). They pointed to the real suffering that goes on beyond numerical aggregates like the unemployment rate.

I remember this ad, because I remember several liberals being worried about this type of Romney campaign. Why? Because the liberals in question basically agreed with it. President Obama was trying to make a Grand Bargain with unemployment above 9 percent. The weak recovery was accepted as a given by the administration instead of the problem that had to be tackled. There was a lot of debate over what could be done and how, but at that point unemployment was off the table. President Obama would pivot back to jobs that fall, but it would remain a quiet priority, especially after so much time had been wasted. And it was a worry that if Mitt Romney ran a campaign that was all about unemployment all the time, President Obama would lose. I thought this was correct at the time.

That has changed with Paul Ryan now announced as Romney's vice presidential running mate. This appears to signal that the Romney campaign will move away from the previous focus on unemployment towards arguing for the conservative transformation of the federal government and the social safety net. This move is being interpreted as a sign of weakness from the campaign, one where they are worried that their previous strategy was failing. But why was the unemployment message failing? The economy isn't much stronger, so it hasn't lost its potency. Mitt Romney's job creation record was being attacked, but that only gets you so far. I think a major reason why is because of an odd contradiction one can see from the recent "Romney Program for Economic Recovery, Growth, and Jobs" released by Romney's economics team. Romney has no actual interest in trying to bring unemployment down faster, which blunts the ability to really say anything about unemployment, but his economics team also wasn't signing off on the far-right's bizarro stimulus plans.

There's already been a lot written on how the paper distorts the research it cites. The paper claims to "speed up the recovery in the short run." How? "By changing course from the policies of the current administration and ending economic uncertainty." What are the bold policies to help those unemployed people President Obama ignored? Tax code reform, block-granting Medicaid, and repealing Dodd-Frank and Obamacare while making "cost-benefit analysis important features of regulation."

Which is to say that Romney wanted to focus on unemployment, but had no real serious plan on how to get unemployed people jobs. I can, quickly, come up with a set of conservative stimulus ideas on how to get the economy going again, but the wide range of these programs are missing from Romney's economics report. They aren't going to hire market monetarists to run the Federal Reserve. Mitt Romney just publicly said the Federal Reserve shouldn't go ahead with another round of quantitive easing [1]. There isn't the argument that the government should just not collect taxes for a year or two with borrowing costs so low, which will also make it that much harder to raise taxes to Clinton-era rates afterwards. There's nothing in the paper about housing, even though one of Romney's advisors is well known for his mass refinancing program to help boost demand. And there's no conditional lending to states to prevent layoffs on the condition that they dismantle public sector unions, or privatize certain government services, or whatever.

Ideas have consequences, and the fact that Romney has no actual ideas for how to get the unemployed jobs means that making unemployment a big issue is only going to have so much traction with the electorate. "The long-term unemployed should vote for me so I can go after financial regulations," or "Vote for me, because I'll just ignore mass unemployment outright rather than not do enough and then pivot away" aren't political strategies that capitalize on the big vunerability Obama has on economic weakness.

Given the number of policy entrepreneurs on the right, it's almost shocking how little effort I've seen to get creative with getting unemployment down. The policy for unemployment is just a set of conservative reforms conservatives would want to see anyway regardless of the economy. And the general message seems to be that unemployment is unfortunate, but the downside risks of trying to combat it are far too high. Better to just get through this period and focus on the long-term economy. The unemployed are, in fact, just bumps in the road.

But the Romney Program document is interesting because it avoids embracing something I'll call "bizarro stimulus." These are arguments that doing things traditionally thought of as the opposite of economic stimulus will be the real stimulus and help bring unemployment down. Romney's economics team doesn't seem to want to go in that direction, yet that is the direction of the House Republicans and of Paul Ryan.

Many economists believe that the Federal Reserve should lower rates, but that a "zero lower bound" holds conventional monetary policy in check. The debate is whether and how unconventional monetary policy can help. In bizarro stimulus, the problem is that the rate is at zero. If you were to raise that rate, you would get capital going again. Here's Paul Ryan from Summer 2010, arguing that "I think literally that if we raised the federal funds rate by a point, it would help push money into the economy, as right now, the safest play is to stay with the federal money and federal paper." This is usually thought of as incorrect by most economists, but that's why it is bizarro stimulus. Ryan has also promoted bills to drop the dual mandate of the Federal Reserve, even though the problem is the Federal Reserve not taking its dual mandate seriously enough.

When the economy is weak and we are far away from full employment, we should run a larger deficit in order to boost demand. Austerity and the slashing of government spending will actually make the economy worse in these times. Unless you are in bizarro economics, under which austerity can expand the economy. David Brook wrote back in 2010, in an article called "Prune and Grow," that “Alberto Alesina of Harvard has surveyed the history of debt reduction. He’s found that, in many cases, large and decisive deficit reduction policies were followed by increases in growth, not recessions.” Though this research has many serious problems, it became part of the core of the new conservatives in the House, a group Paul Ryan is influential with. Republicans' economic policy in 2011 was all about expansionary austerity, with their JEC report making several references to the possibility of austerity being offset by confidence and certainty. Romney actually pointed out the absurdity of expansionary austerity back in May of this year, noting "I don’t want to have us go into a recession in order to balance the budget." Nobody could tell if Romney was going off message with that statement.

It's interesting that Romney's advisors don't touch either of these ideas, yet they are an important part of how the House Republicans approach the economy. Will the Ryan pick also signal that Romney will move much further to the right on economic issues? We've rarely ever had to ask if a presidential candidate agrees with the views of his vice-presidential running mate, rather than the other way around, but that is now a relevant question.

[1] Can you imagine the debate and coverage that would happen if President Obama encouraged Bernanke to move with QE3? Yet Mitt Romney calling out against QE3 doesn't get noticed, and certainly isn't thought of as "politicizing the Federal Reserve," even though it obviously is.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog: