I won’t reproduce all of it here, if for no other reason than,
With some of the economic indicators looking a bit dicey, President Obama traveled to Ohio last week to tout what the administration considers a good-news story: the rescue of the domestic automobile industry. In fact, he also made it the subject of his weekly radio address.
We take no view on whether the administration’s efforts on behalf of the automobile industry were a good or bad thing; that’s a matter for the editorial pages and eventually the historians. But we are interested in the facts the president cited to make his case.
What we found is one of the most misleading collections of assertions we have seen in a short presidential speech. Virtually every claim by the president regarding the auto industry needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.
The president misleads most of all about how much we lost on the Chrysler bailout, contradicting his own Treasury Department in asserting that taxpayers turned a profit on the loans rather than absorbing more than a billion in losses. How does he pull it off? By excluding a $4 billion loan made to Chrysler in the last month of the Bush administration from his figures. What’s especially disingenuous about this is that Obama supported the Bush loan while a candidate. Yet in last week’s radio address he goes on to say
“In the year before I was President, this industry lost more than 400,000 jobs, and two great American companies, Chrysler and GM, stood on the brink of collapse. Now, we had a few options. We could have done what a lot of folks in Washington thought we should do — nothing.”
Is he implying that the Bush administration did nothing — except make billions in loans you supported at and the time before reading them out of the record when it became rhetorically convenient to do so?