American Auto Rescue an American Success Story

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

The Obama administration rescued the American automotive industry, in one of the president’s biggest but under-reported success stories. Political Animal – Turning the auto bailout into a winning issue:

The new goal is to not only let voters know about this, but use it to boost Obama’s standing in states like Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania.

And part of this is about reminding folks not only who got the policy right, but who didn’t.

“The very Republicans that now want to be president lined up against this to make it a political issue instead of a jobs issue,” said United Steelworkers political director Tim Waters, whose union, along with the United Autoworkers Union, depends heavily on the car industry and is concentrated in the industrial Midwest.

“Much to their disappointment now — it proved to be very, very successful. Guys like Mitt Romney, certainly Mitch Daniels, and even (Mike) Huckabee and guys like that — they were actually willing to sit and watch the utter destruction of thousands of communities,” he said. 

This criticism has the added benefit of being true. Pawlenty called the bailout “misguided”; Gingrich called it “dangerous”; and Romney called for letting Detroit “go bankrupt.” Huntsman and Daniels opposed the successful rescue, too.

In other words, at the height of the economic downturn, with the automotive industry — the backbone of American manufacturing — on the brink of collapse, Obama took a chance on a risky plan. Leading Republicans were certain it would fail. They were wrong, and the president was right. Their way would have thrown hundreds of thousands of industry workers off the job, and Obama’s way ended up preventing these massive job losses.

Now the trick is letting the Rust Belt know about it.

With this in mind, Democrats are on the offensive, calling out Republican presidential candidates who saw the crisis and said officials should do nothing. This video was released by the DNC this morning:

Guys! Way too politically wonky. The "best ad evah" for Detroit making a comeback was this Superbowl ad from Chrysler, "Imported from Detroit" (powerful and moving):

Fortunately for the White House, all of the news related to the bailout continues to be good.

Chrysler said Tuesday that it had paid back $7.6 billion in loans from the American and Canadian governments, marking another significant step in the revival of the company, the smallest of the Detroit automakers.

Chrysler said it made payments of $5.9 billion to the United States Treasury and $1.7 billion to Export Development Canada in a series of transactions completed Tuesday morning. The payments retired outstanding loans and covered interest on the debt.

Chrysler’s chief executive, Sergio Marchionne, planned to formally announce the move at a ceremony Tuesday afternoon at an assembly plant in Sterling Heights, Mich…. “The loans gave us a rare second chance to demonstrate what the people of this company can deliver,” Mr. Marchionne said. “We owe a debt of gratitude to those whose intervention allowed Chrysler Group to re-establish itself as a strong and viable carmaker.”

The Obama administration is hailing the repayment as proof that its policy worked — an argument that has the benefit of being true. Indeed, Obama’s policy has proven so effective, Chrysler is paying back American taxpayers six years early.

As E.J. Dionne Jr. of the Washington Post recently noted, “Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure.”

Attention has been paid. Thank you for your faith in American workers Mr. President.