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.

The White House released its official "Recovery by the Numbers" today, stating that the recovery act is "responsible for" between 2 and 2.4 million jobs through 2009. The numbers also show that the economy grew 5.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2009, whereas in the fourth quarter of 2008 the economy shrank by 6 percent.

Also detailed in the numbers are where the billions spent to date have gone, including:

• Advanced Batteries and Electric Vehicles: $2.4 billion in grants have been awarded to companies and educational institutions in over 20 states to fund 48 new advanced battery and electric drive projects that will help power the next generation of advanced vehicles.

• Smart Energy Grid: $3.4 billion in grants have been awarded to private companies, utilities, manufacturers and cities to fund smart energy grid projects that will support tens of thousands of jobs and benefit consumers in 49 states.

• Energy-Efficient Vehicles: $300 million in grants have been awarded to 25 cost-share projects under DOE's Clean Cities program to expand the nation's fleet of alternative fuel vehicles by putting more than 9,000 alternative fuel and energy efficient vehicles on the road.

{related_content}President Obama spoke at the White House today, saying that the stimulus has reversed the economy's slide. "One year later, it is largely thanks to the recovery act that a second depression is no longer a possibility," according to a report from ABC News. "It's laying out the foundation for where we need to go."

Vice President Joe Biden used a spot on the op-ed pages in USA Today to say that "The best is yet to come" from stimulus spending:

[T]o me, the most exciting thing about the Recovery Act is not what we've done, but what lies ahead. Many Recovery Act programs that will build the groundwork for the economy of the 21st century will be implemented in the next few months. Broadband access for small and rural communities. New factories where electric cars and clean fuel cells will be made. Wind farms, solar panels — and the facilities to construct them. New health technologies and smarter electrical power grids will be creating jobs this year thanks to the Recovery Act.

Backing up the Veep's point is a new report card from Onvia, the group that has set up Recovery.org, a parallel site to the White House's official Recovery.gov website. Although the report card gives the administration mostly mediocre grades -- Cs and Bs for jobs impacts, spending velocity, transparency and the like -- Onvia expects big progress in 2010. With 89,000 government entities in the U.S. expected to spend $5.5 trillion in 2010, job growth in 2010 will be significant, directly or indirectly creating as many as 1.1 million jobs this year. (GreenBiz.com Senior Writer Marc Gunther covered Onvia last year; you can read his blog post here, and listen to and read an interview with its CIO here.

Although the public appetite for stimulus spending may have diminished, or at least the hunger for immediate results appears unabated, Obama called on Congress to create a new "jobs bill" right away, a bill that is currently making the rounds through Capitol Hill, and which will serve as a smaller, second stimulus.

And we'll be watching closely to see how 2010 shapes up for stimulus spending. You can follow our coverage at GreenBiz.com/stimulus.