A nearly impossible job just got even tougher

A nearly impossible job just got even tougher

By the end of today — barring some sort of Election Day meltdown — one of two men will be the nation’s president-elect.

And whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain, he had to be asking himself last night why he’d want the job.

Last week, the U.S. Commerce department announced that in the quarter just concluded the Gross Domestic Product — that’s the totality of the economy — shrank by 0.3 percent. Since the definition of a recession is two straight quarters of the economy getting smaller, it means we’re very likely in one. That’s in a recession by definition, as opposed to feeling like you’re in a recession, which has been the prevailing sense for some time now.

Both Obama and McCain have made ambitious promises about what they would do once in office, but those grand plans will have to wait because the next president’s top priority will be the distinctly unglamorous task of stabilizing the economy.

For decades, conventional wisdom held that as General Motors goes, so goes the nation. For years, that thought has sent shivers down spines.

This week, the news from the entire automobile industry was about as bad as it gets.

GM’s October U.S. sales plunged 45 percent; Ford’s, 30 percent; Chrysler, 35 percent; Nissan North America, 33 percent; Honda, 25 percent and Toyota, 23 percent. Those are figures compared to sales for the same month last year.

It’s bad

“This is clearly a severe, severe recession for the U.S. automotive industry and something we really can’t sustain,” Mike DiGiovanni, General Motors Corp.’s executive director of global market and industry analysis, told the Associated Press. If GM’s sales were adjusted for population growth, October would be the worst month of the post-World War II era, DiGiovanni said.

It was during the early post-war era that Charles E. Wilson made the statement that came to be paraphrased as, “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Wilson was being question on his nomination by President Eisenhower for secretary of Defense. When he was asked if as secretary he could make a decision against the interests of General Motors, Wilson said he could, but added that he could not conceive of such a situation, “because for years I thought what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.”

Today, what is bad for the United States — tight money, growing unemployment, plummeting consumer confidence — is bad for General Motors, Ford, Chrysler and most automobile makers in the world. And vice versa.

After comparing GM’s October sales to those of the post-war era, DiGiovanni said, “Clearly we’re in a very dire situation.” It is just one of a number of dire situations John McCain or Barack Obama will be inheriting.