Joe Biden

UPDATED … WASHINGTON — In case you hadn’t noticed, the Obama administration is setting in motion a pro-stimulus PR blitz this week to defend against skeptics and spell out plans to create or save another 600,000 jobs in the next 100 days.

The White House put up a new web site today with a so-called Roadmap to Recovery – for transportation, veterans, education etc. — that has more dots on maps than specifics about how money will be spent.

But the administration has high hopes, and after a cabinet meeting Vice President Joe Biden sat on the phone with some regional reporters for 45 minutes to talk about stimulus spending and the sped-up plans to get things done.

“This is going to be a very busy summer in what is usually a lazy, hot summer in this town,” he said.

Twice during his presentation he referred to positive effects of a Missouri project benefiting from the stimulus package — the Lost Creek Wind Farm, a project of Wind Capital Group of St. Louis.

Biden’s point was that the Recovery Act (White House folks don’t call it the stimulus) is creating jobs as well as renewable energy. He was referring to the purchase of 100 transformers (which convert wind to electricity) from ABB Inc. of Jefferson City. The vice president visited ABB during a trip to Missouri in April.

“There’s a transformer factory in Missouri that was in real trouble,” Biden said, “but because of tax credits made available for a wind farm, orders for transformers are up … People are making decent wages.”

The Missouri Republican Party countered today that Biden was guilty of a “gaffe” given a report last week in the Jefferson City News-Tribune that ABB had laid off 25 people, bringing its workforce down to 600.

“Biden should ask one of the newly unemployed workers or their families how successful the stimulus package has been in saving or creating jobs,” Lloyd Smith, the party’s executive director, said in a statement this (Tuesday) afternoon. 

Biden was describing one of the ways the stimulus is working: No federal money actually went to Wind Capital or Lost Farm; the benefits were to investors in the $300 million in the form of tax credits.

Until the stimulus passed, lenders were less willing to invest in projects like Lost Farm.

Biden said that by October, Americans will be able to visit above mentioned White House web site and find every stimulus dollar spent by zip code. Such a mammoth cyberspace undertaking is creating jobs in itself; the White House has put the stimulus aggregation project out for bids.

“Like I said, nobody has ever done this before,” Biden said.