Stuck in Reverse

Everyone's an expert on lousy American cars.

That, I believe, is one reason why the GM bankruptcy/bailout is so unpopular.

If you've been waiting for Detroit to figure out how to make quality cars that people want to buy, you've been waiting an awfully long time. I remember the Japanese import quotas of the 1980s, when the Big Three begged for just a little more time so they could improve their autos.

In surveying the media landscape, it seems that the right despises the GM bailout while the left is merely sickened by it. Nobody likes this thing. The same goes for Chrysler, but General Motors is bigger and occupies a larger space in the national psyche.

That's why much of the punditry about Monday's bankruptcy begins with personal reminiscence. Tom Brokaw talked about his first car being a 1946 Pontiac. Gene Robinson wrote that he started out behind the wheel of a 1964 Buick LeSabre. (Okay, I'll play: my first car was a red 1969 Dodge Charger. But after years of Chrysler and Ford clunkers that spent too much time in the shop, I soured on American cars as well.)

It was nice when the USA made great cars that provided the heartland with a thriving industrial base. But GM and Chrysler (which got the original bailout in the Lee Iococca years) have been on a long glide path toward oblivion. The Bush administration provided the stopgap funding last fall, and the Obama administration completed the takeover, with the taxpayers' investment now $50 billion.

There were no good alternatives, as allowing the company to simply fail would have thrown far more people out of work.

But is anybody enthusiastic about Government Motors? Is the shrunken company, with its federal overseers, likely to start producing terrific cars? Will Obama be an Iacocca-like pitchman in future commercials? ("And if you act now, I'll throw in some floor mats and this $100 Treasury bond".)

In the Washington Examiner, Byron York says Obama's car czar role may hurt him:

"Observers across the political spectrum have marveled at Barack Obama's ability to maintain a high job approval rating even as the public grows skeptical about some of his key policy initiatives. There's a feeling, among Republicans at least, that sooner or later he's going to reach a tipping point between his personal popularity and the unpopularity of his proposals, and that his job approval rating will suffer. That moment will come when Obama has to actually stand behind specific proposals -- when he has to put his name on a health-care plan that will lead to the rationing of medical treatment, or an energy plan that will lead to significantly higher electrical bills.

"We might be catching a glimpse of Obama's tipping point with his handling of General Motors' bankruptcy, and Chrysler's before it. The government takeover of the automakers is by far the most unpopular thing Obama has done so far. And it's not just unpopular -- it is partisan, appealing to the base of his party and virtually no one else. . . .

"Obama knows the public doesn't want the government to run GM and Chrysler, which is why he has said hundreds of times that the government has 'no interest' in running the automakers. But on Monday, at a White House event to hail the GM bankruptcy, he gave away the game when he said the feds will stay out of running GM 'in all but the most fundamental corporate decisions.' "