WASHINGTON, DC — One year ago, Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Investment Act. Today, he and top administration officials are making the rounds to highlight the plan's success in recasting the economy in a greener light.

The $787 billion stimulus act was a combination package of tax cuts, increased federal spending, and grants and loans, intended to spur employers and keep the economy afloat. Much of the grant and loan money was aimed at making the country more energy efficient, paving a path toward a clean, low-carbon economy.

The economy is slowly recovering, but widespread unemployment, political opposition, and a slow start to distributing the funds from the stimulus have meant that the stimulus to date has only limited popularity. In fact, a poll from CNN last month found the following confusing responses:

A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll conducted last month found a majority of respondents -- 56 percent -- opposed the stimulus plan. Forty-two percent supported it.

Fifty-eight percent, however, believed the stimulus had stabilized or improved the economy, while 41 percent said it either had no effect or had made the economy worse.

So, what's the reality of the impacts the stimulus has had to date?

In a nutshell, it seems that the stimulus plan is working, albeit maybe not fast enough to quell dissent. As the New York Times's David Leonhardt writes:

... [L]ook at the outside evaluations of the stimulus. Perhaps the best-known economic research firms are IHS Global Insight, Macroeconomic Advisers and Moody's Economy.com. They all estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs so far and that its ultimate impact will be roughly 2.5 million jobs. The Congressional Budget Office, an independent agency, considers these estimates to be conservative.

Yet I'm guessing you don't think of the stimulus bill as a big success. You've read columns (by me, for example) complaining that it should have spent money more quickly. Or you've heard about the phantom ZIP code scandal: the fact that a government Web site mistakenly reported money being spent in nonexistent ZIP codes.

And many of the criticisms are valid. The program has had its flaws. But the attention they have received is wildly disproportionate to their importance. To hark back to another big government program, it's almost as if the lasting image of the lunar space program was Apollo 6, an unmanned 1968 mission that had engine problems, and not Apollo 11, the moon landing.

To spread the word about the stimulus plan's successes, White House officials have been hitting the airwaves for the past few days to tout real-world results, while any number of other groups are digging into what the past year has brought.