Obama hails auto bailout as good news in Michigan
Associated Press
DETROIT
A year after the government’s big auto-industry bailouts, President Barack Obama on Friday trumpeted increased car sales and progress on battery- powered vehicles as a beacon of success in his administration’s battle to revive a hurting U.S. economy. But his upbeat assessment can’t mask daunting challenges for U.S. automakers and painfully high unemployment.
Touring Chrysler and General Motors assembly plants, Obama argued that his administration’s unpopular $60 billion bailout of the two companies — essentially government-funded forced bankruptcies — was paying off. Clear evidence that he sees an opening to appeal to recession-weary voters, Obama will continue to press the same case next week when he tours the Chicago plant where Ford Motor Co. builds the Taurus sedan and plans to assemble a new Explorer sport-utility vehicle.
Few disagree that the intervention helped keep the companies afloat.
Obama and fellow Democrats are eager to seize on the auto-industry story, framing it as a success before the fall congressional elections.
At Chrysler’s Jefferson North plant, which recently added about 1,100 workers for a second shift, the president told employees, to loud cheers, “You are proving the naysayers wrong.”
After touring GM’s massive Hamtramck assembly plant not far away — where he drove a battery-powered Chevy Volt about 10 feet for the news cameras — Obama was even more animated.
“There’s a just-say-no-crowd in Washington” that would have let the domestic car industry die, he said.
Obama said he understands why many in the country were skeptical about — or outright opposed to — a massive infusion of taxpayer cash into the industry and acknowledged that “the politics of it weren’t good.”
The taxpayer-financed bailout prevented complete failure of the domestic industry and set it up for long-term success, said Jesse Toprak, an economist and vice president of industry trends at auto website TrueCar.com. The industry has hired 55,000 workers since the bailout, the strongest year of job growth since 1999.
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