agood clip. but nbc meet the press says these are the facts about the obama record. unemployment up 25%. the national debt up 35%. the price of gas up 104%. obama s 830 billion-dollar stimulus failed. shovel ledy was not as shovel ready as we expected. 14 million out of work. america drowning in debt. it s time to take away obama s blank check. juan: mr. rove joins us now from washington. carl rove, it s so early, i m thinking to myself why is karl spending all this money now and can i only think, well, you know what? americans generally say they personally like president obama and you want to make the case, you know what? his policies have been tragic, a disaster. and you want to separate president obama from those policies right now. am i right, karl? well, in part. it s also, like, juan, we are in a big battle over the debt
spending and do son 00 debt on the debt ceiling. juan: karl, you think this is going to impact that debate with the negotiations going on right now in washington. i have got to tell you the obama campaign people in response to your ad came out today and said karl rove s ads cloud over the fact that the recession started under president bush. they don t mention that bush was spending money on tarp and the like and they don t mention, of course, that many of the republican candidates just want to run back to the old bush policies. isn t this inviting the criticism, karl? yeah. let them put that up on a television ad and waste their money. american people are sick and tired of the president blaming everything on his predecessor. it is his 830 billion-dollar stimulus bill that failed. it was he who made these promises on january 9th, 2009 as to what they would do. it was him who went out and said if we pass this at the time of the signing in denver all these great things would happen i
their level best to come out of their circumstances and they ve got this giant obstacle in the way. it is this president s policies. greta: joining us karl rove. author of courage and consequence. nice to see you. great to see you greta. greta: joke or wisecrack and admission of failure? well, i suspect it was meant as a joke. but the joke is on us. if anybody looked at the stimulus bill, 830 billion dollars, they would have seen out of the total 5.7%, 47 billion dollars was allocated to the federal highway administration, the mass transit authority, high speed rail or the faa. we all thought shovel-ready building a road, bridge, extending a railroad, building a runway, high speed rail. that was 5%, less than 6% of the total amount of spending that was in this bill. as a result, the extravagant
promises about how shovel-ready projects, it was 6%. greta: the shovel-ready ones of the 6% were expected to rev up the economy and get going. where did the other 94% go? it was spent on a lot of things that were not shovel-ready projects. greta: anything that generates more jobs? no a bunch to bail out state and local government budgets. so they could keep workers aboard. most of the money went to education required you to maintain top up you had to maintain your current level of activity. and use the new federal money to add on top of it. greta: to make payroll, maybe add some employees. but the problem is unless those people went out and spent more to rev up the economy, we are back having to make payroll the next cycle. do you think they could have sold this to the american people had they said look we are asking for 830 billion dollars and we want to reemphasize, only 6% is going
at a bad joke. they knew from the get-go out of the 830 billion dollars in the stimulus bill 47 billion dollars went for shovel-ready projects. some of those shovel-ready projects are the high speed rail projects that are not being built and won t be. not even all of the 47 billions has been spent. not all has been obligated. certainly we haven «tten the kind of jobs that we were lead to believe we had. greta: karl, thank you. you bet. greta: tears flowing today in the casey anthony murder trial this time not casey, but her mother cindy. prosecutors call cindy anthony to the stand for the third time. and questioned the grandmother cindy about something disturbing. remnants of a t-shirt found with 2-year-old caylee s remains. would it be fair to say that you have never seen that shirt at your house? i don t ever remember