Is Obama closing GOP car dealers?
By: Mark Tapscott
Examiner Columnist
May 28, 2009
There appears to be a side to the Chrysler bankruptcy that has the look of an ugly partisanship not seen in this town since Tricky Dick was in the White House composing his enemies list and checking it twice every night while watching the evening TV newscast.
Bloggers on the Right side of the Blogosphere are up in arms over data suggesting that President Barack Obama’s White House auto industry potentates are targeting for closure Chrysler dealers with records of contributing either to Republicans like Sen. John McCain or to other Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary.
Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross pointed initially at the remarkable number of closed Chrysler dealerships whose owners happen to have been contributors to Obama opponents, mainly Republicans.
But those observations were all couched with important qualifiers, particularly that all conclusions were necessarily preliminary, pending completion of a comprehensive analysis of the political contributions by all closed Chrysler dealership owners had been done and comparison of those with contributions by dealers who are not being closed.
That said, when multiple dealers who have been closed are found to have contributed millions to Republicans and mere hundreds to Obama, the serious number-crunching cannot be completed too soon.
Meanwhile, Ross seems to be ground zero for this story, and I encourage you to check out his multiple updates at http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/05/red-alert-did-campaign-contributions.html.
Among those updates is the one linking to a Reuters report quoting a lawyer representing dealers being closed came away from a deposition of a senior Chrysler executive with the distinct impression that the company is simply following orders coming from the White House.
“It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers. It really wasn’t Chrysler’s decision. They are under enormous pressure from the president’s automotive task force,” said attorney Leonard Bellavia.
Bellavia zeroed in on the fundamental problem with Obama’s takeover of two of Detroit Big Three — something is terribly wrong when the government tells corporations who to hire and fire, what products to sell, and who will be their dealers.
“What is the next task force? Shoe stores? Pizzerias?” Bellavia said. “The problem we have is the free enterprise system is not run by the government, it’s run by business entrepreneurs. The dealers themselves will decide if it’s not productive to go forward.”
In view of these facts, when is the mainstream media going to challenge Obama to explain why he thinks he can do a better job running car companies than can the shareholders, bondholders and dealers? And where in the Constitution does it say the president has such authority in the first place?
More to the point, when is the mainstream media going to start calling what Obama is doing what it is, which at the very least is a crude kind of South American, crony statism. Given the Chicago roots of Obama and his chief of staff, the phrase used recently by The Examiner’s Michael Barone is probably most accurate — “gangster government.”
If you doubt the accuracy of Barone’s formulation, check out another recent Reuters report, this one on a recent study by the California-based bond strategist Christopher Garman. Garman compared “spreads, or bonds’ extra yields over U.S. Treasury yields, for companies with collective bargaining agreements with the high-yield bond market as a whole.”
And guess what? According to Reuters, Garman found that spreads for unionized companies were 11 percent higher in February than those without collective bargaining agreements, and the gap has remained, measuring at nine points this month.
In other words, companies that want to prosper in the anti-capitalist world Obama is creating in America will first have to make their peace with Big Labor before heading to Washington hat and checkbooks in hand to seek favor from the strong men in the White House and their enforcers in the Treasury Department and elsewhere in the executive branch.
Obama calls it “change we can believe in.” Vito Corleone called it “making them an offer they can’t refuse.”
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
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