Auto-magic For The People

More needs to be made about the fact that President Obama's choice to save the auto companies when Republicans wanted them to die was a serious success.  Both Chrysler and GM are back into profitability now, and GM is planning to make a common stock offering soon in order to raise the rest of the money to pay back the American taxpayer.  The Village is finally paying attention.

But a year and a half later, many of the critics have retreated from their sharpest attacks as they watch the auto industry once again turn a profit and begin adding jobs in communities such as Detroit, which desperately need them.

Obama's visit to a Chrysler plant in Detroit on Friday was designed as a victory rally -- complete with campaign-style trappings -- an "I told you so" event aimed squarely at his Republican critics who had attacked the auto bailouts as government takeovers.

A feisty Obama was welcomed with loud applause by about 1,500 auto workers inside the plant that makes the Jeep Grand Cherokee, a vehicle the president said was the first new car he ever owned. If his critics had won, he said, the plant would have been shuttered and dark. 

There's no satisfying some, like radio host Rush Limbaugh, who this week referred to GM as Obama Motors. And the auto turnaround is not enough to fix places like Detroit, where 30 percent unemployment has ravaged the city like few others in the United States.  

But as Obama arrived here Friday to trumpet the industry's progress, Corker refrained from saying that the bailouts were bad for the country. He says the administration's methods were "heavy-handed" but also takes credit for helping to shape the bailout. He prodded the Obama administration to force the companies to lessen their debt and achieve a more favorable union agreement.

"The ideas we laid out there were followed through," Corker said in an interview. "I take some pleasure out of helping make that contribution. . . . I think what we did is we forced a debate and we forced a hard look at these companies." 

And now of course Republicans like Corker are trying to take credit for something that Republicans bitterly opposed, while the rest of the GOP is still bitterly complaining that Obama is a socialist.  At least the press is finally paying attention to the fact that if the Republicans were in charge right now, America wouldn't have an auto industry outside of Ford.

Sobering thought, indeed.