Klain: Give Obama a Victory Lap for Auto Rescue
By Ron Klain
Bloomberg
May 31, 2011
This past weekend, my hometown marked the 100th anniversary of its great civic festival, the Indianapolis 500. There are many ways to explain the race’s enduring appeal -- the pageantry, the drivers, the traditions -- but what makes it truly compelling is the cars: their roaring engines, the constant innovation, the new technologies that set records for speed.
Six hundred miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, at the White House, cars also were very much front and center over the weekend. With the president in Europe, the administration was paying homage to cars here at home, rolling out (pardon the pun) Vice President Joseph Biden to visit an auto dealership in New Hampshire and to deliver a car-themed radio address, and dispatching other officials to Detroit to celebrate Chrysler Group LLC’s early repayment of $6 billion in federal loan guarantees. President Barack Obama will do his part June 3, when he visits a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio.
Of all the policy challenges I saw Obama tackle in my two years in the White House, none was more complex than turning around the U.S. auto industry. When the president took office, the industry was in free fall. Sales of cars and trucks, which had topped 17 million in 2006, fell to 10.6 million in 2009. Two of America’s three major automakers were insolvent, kept alive by weekly inflows of federal cash. U.S. automakers had an unsustainable cost structure, were badly trailing their foreign competitors in the production of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles, and seemed unable to make the hard choices needed to arrest their downward spiral.
(Continued here.)
Bloomberg
May 31, 2011
This past weekend, my hometown marked the 100th anniversary of its great civic festival, the Indianapolis 500. There are many ways to explain the race’s enduring appeal -- the pageantry, the drivers, the traditions -- but what makes it truly compelling is the cars: their roaring engines, the constant innovation, the new technologies that set records for speed.
Six hundred miles from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, at the White House, cars also were very much front and center over the weekend. With the president in Europe, the administration was paying homage to cars here at home, rolling out (pardon the pun) Vice President Joseph Biden to visit an auto dealership in New Hampshire and to deliver a car-themed radio address, and dispatching other officials to Detroit to celebrate Chrysler Group LLC’s early repayment of $6 billion in federal loan guarantees. President Barack Obama will do his part June 3, when he visits a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio.
Of all the policy challenges I saw Obama tackle in my two years in the White House, none was more complex than turning around the U.S. auto industry. When the president took office, the industry was in free fall. Sales of cars and trucks, which had topped 17 million in 2006, fell to 10.6 million in 2009. Two of America’s three major automakers were insolvent, kept alive by weekly inflows of federal cash. U.S. automakers had an unsustainable cost structure, were badly trailing their foreign competitors in the production of fuel-efficient and electric vehicles, and seemed unable to make the hard choices needed to arrest their downward spiral.
(Continued here.)
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1 Comments:
Of course… there are the ‘interesting’ Obamacare waivers for unions, Chevy dealers taking the $7,000 federal tax credit themselves, a shortage of low cost cars (sought out by low income folks) that is in part due to the market intervention program called cash for clunkers... I suppose this is the new definition of success.
Next week Klain can write glowing reports about our clear foreign policy and how everyone around the world loves us…
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