A New York Times bestseller, now with a new foreword by the author, The New New Deal is a riveting story about change in the Obama era—an essential handbook for citizens who want the truth about the president, his record, and his enemies.

Michael Grunwald tells the secret history of President Obama’s stimulus bill, the purest distillation of Change We Can Believe In and a microcosm of Obama’s successes and political failures. The $800 billion stimulus became a national joke, but Grunwald shows in stunning detail how it really is a new New Deal, larger than FDR’s and just as transformative. It prevented a depression while launching a quiet policy revolution, and, like the New Deal, its main legacy will be change.

The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, financing unprecedented investments in energy efficiency and the world’s largest wind and solar projects. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in US history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line.

Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America.