The Big Obama Administration Thread

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Chandos, you have to admit that, shady as Bush's controversies may have been, they pale in comparison to this "Dealergate" accusation. Now, how much will pan out is yet to be seen.

Also, Drew, I think the point of Martaug's citing Iku as a potential subject of detention is that there are no criteria given and no oversight suggested so far. Now sure, no plan has been presented yet, but the very idea that preventative detention has been considered should worry you.

 

Time will tell. Eventually, the administration is going to have to release how they made the decisions. /me channels Johnnie Cochran "If the answers aren't all right, Congress may indict"

Let me get this straight. Are you somehow claiming that the tax cuts were directed to only benefit Republicans and that Democrats didn't benefit. Wow, that must have been some crazily worded legislation to pull that off. The way I remember the tax cuts worked was very simple. All they did was reduce the rates for some of the higher brackets. I will never understand how people who don't pay taxes can get so upset when they don't benefit from a tax cut. You have to pay taxes to get a benefit from a tax cut. For some reason they don't complain about tax increases, but maybe that is because they don't pay taxes. This has always baffled me.

 

TGS: It's the same principle when politicians try to slow the growth of the social security payments -- no money is being taken away, the increases are just being kept to a managable amount. Yet the AARP still goes nuts about it: "What?!? We're not getting the increases we want?!? YOU'RE STEALING FROM US!!!"

 

Regarding dealergate: It is 100% true that the vast majority of dealerships that are closing are owned by Republicans. However, if you look at campaign donations for the 2008 election (which is part of the public record), you will see that 88% of all donations by car dealerships were made to either a Republican candidate or the RNC. This suggests that the vast majority of car dealerships are owned by Republicans. If car dealerships had a 50-50 chance of being owned by a Democrat or a Republican, then the closings would certainly be a concern. However, the reason that so few dealerships owned by Democrats are closing is because there are so few delearships owned by Democrats. I know 538 did a story on this - I'll look for it and post it if I find it.

EDIT: From the article:

Here's the full article, complete with the math.

 

Regardless of what you think of Bush, this clip proves he is completely politically clueless...

 

...the politically clueless don't win even on a local level. Just because you don't agree with him, doesn't mean he's clueless. You can call him evil incarnate, but Bush was quite good at politics and very adept at winning elections.

My biggest complaint against him was the War in Iraq and funneling money from other needs to finance the war.

 

You only can come to that conclusion when you take things out of context. If you read more about the clip you will come to find out it was taken at a Catholic Charity fundraiser attended by Hilliary and Gore and at this fundraiser the politicians made fun of themselves to the delight of the audience (judging by the laughter and applause).

You can go here to read more if you like

 

That's fine if you want to make jokes. But honestly, the equivalent of what Bush said is essentially the same as if Obama came out and said that minorities are his base (and therefore focus). There are tasteful, relatively politically correct jokes you can make, and then there are jokes that just make you look really bad. And I think making a statement to the effect of "rich people are my constituents", is kind of a stupid thing to say.

 

I'm not so sure. In my opinion, there's nothing more refreshing than hearing a politician tell the unvarnished truth. If Bush would have talked like that more often, I would have liked him a lot more.

Spoiler

...but I still wouldn't have voted for him.

 

Ok aldeth lets use your figures. 789 dealerships being closed, 88% republican & 12% democrat. that should be 95 democrat owned dealerships closing. How many are being closed? so far, 2. Oh, and he is being considered for 5 NEW dealerships.(now why in the hell would they be opening new dealerships when they are closing almost 25% of the existing ones?)
lets look at RLJ-Mclarty-Landers.

Thats right,
in Bentonville AR both of his competitors are being closed,

in Huntsville AL both of his competitors are being closed,

in Branson MO all 3 of his competitors are being closed,

in Lee's Summit MO all 4 of his competitors are being closed,

in Bossier city/Shreveport LA 2 other dealerships are here, the one owned byMarshall Hebert(who donated to the dems) is staying open while the one owned by Frank Stinson(who donated to the GOP) is being forced to close.

If you can't see somethings wrong with this whole business, you are seriously deluding yourself.

 

Noesis, it was a common liberal talking point at the time. I seem to recall a lot of the jokes the politicians told at that dinner were centered around their opponents' accusations.

Also, just as a note, I hate political correctness. Political correctness is the kind of BS that gets a white guy kicked out of college because he told a Poly Sci class that, as a recent immigrant from South Africa, he considered himself a white african american (note, this actually happened, last I heard he was suing the school).

 

You have obviously never worked for corporate America before. You have no idea. And if you believe they make rational decisions (especially since they are already bankrupt, and it's not because they make GOOD business decisions), you are deluding yourself.

 

Chandos you obviously did not read the reuters link

If anyone is deluding themselves, it is those who are still trying to defend this administrations illegal antics.

 

Martaug, I fail to see how the fact that the same executives that drove Chrysler into the ground -- again -- opposed terminating 25% of its dealers in any way supports the largely unsupported claim that the Obama administration and/or Chrysler went out of their way to close Republican owned dealerships while keeping Democrat owned dealerships open. As Aldeth's numbers showed, 88-92% (depending on whose numbers you use) of donations by car dealers went to Republicans and the RNC. You can't of course extrapolate those numbers out to hard conclusions about how many dealers are republicans and how many are democrats, because some dealers probably donate to both the RNC and the DNC, while others don't donate at all, but the data clearly does indicate that dealers are more than just disproportionately republican.

While I'm sure you can come up with some red-state examples in which a democrat got to keep his dealership whilst a bunch of republicans around him closed, I'm sure we could head up to some blue states and find the exact opposite without too much difficulty. The likelihood is that larger dealerships with higher sales numbers got to stay open while smaller dealerships catering to smaller markets had to close up shop -- meaning that dealerships closer to large cities (and thus more likely to be democrats than your typical dealer) were, in fact more likely to remain open. The numbers, as yet, prove nothing, but the math is still currently in favor of the idea that there has been no wrongdoing on the part of the Obama administration or Chrysler regarding their methodology.

 

Really drew? Well then why don't you just provide us some examples of these rep owned dealers that had their dem owned competitors closed.
Otherwise you are just spewing crap.

 

I also would like to see some evidence of this. The investigations that I have been following haven't turned up any instances of this yet. I'm still not quite convinced that it is bad as some on the right are making it out to be, but it has potential to be so. I'm troubled by the one case where a group owned six dealerships and that group is made up of Clinton and Dem supporters and they didn't lose a single dealership, but they had their competition wiped out.

This story may have more legs then the Dems want it to have.

 

Drew I'm curious, what's your background? Policy Analyst? Blogger? You made some great points.

I will just add that business decisions would probably override such petty politics. It is more critical at this point for GM to emerge a profitable company than it would be for Obama to play small town politics and close down only Republican owned businesses regardless of performance.

 

You mean like the unsubstantiated crap you're spewing about the exact same subject? Anytime a Democrat gets to keep his dealership(s), the odds already tell you that the people around him who don't get to keep theirs are almost certainly republicans, which on its own de-claws your examples of supposed wrong-doing. My theory is already fairly well substantiated by the simple fact that while most of the closings occurred in red counties that Obama lost, blue counties -- even in the south -- are more likely to be positioned near a large market (ie large city). Large markets -- even in the south -- are more likely to be democratic, meaning that the dealers in those counties are also more likely to be democrats. I doubt you would belabor this point, since you're well aware of the fact that rural areas overwhelmingly vote republican while urban areas overwhelmingly vote democrat.

That said, I needn't counter your example since it is on its own too flawed to be meaningful in any real way. You state that because the criterion for closing a specific dealership included "sales volume, customer service scores, local market share and average household income in the immediate area", the odds are that any randomly selected single dealership would have a roughly 75% chance of staying in business, which is true enough, but the closing decisions aren't random. The example you took from someone else's blog and re-posted at SP did not bother to compare the sales numbers, customer service scores, local market shares, or the houshold incomes in the immediate area of RLJ's dealerships to those of the dealerships around it that weren't as lucky as he was. Without this information, your example just isn't meaningful. It is highly unlikely that RLJ got to run so many dealerships by doing poorly.

Since the math is already in favor of the "no foul play, just bad math" theory of events, I have neither the desire nor the inclination to slog through local records until I find a republican who got to keep his large network of dealerships while some democrats around him closed. Why? Because it wouldn't mean a damn thing. Because the closing decisions aren't random, and without knowing the sales numbers, customer service scores, local market share, and average household income in the immediate area, my numbers would be just as meaningless as yours were.

 

This would work, except that the odds don't actually bear up to reality. The point of what Martaug posted is that the statistical actuallity of a Rep losing his business while a competing Dem kept his vastly outpaces the statistical probability. What this means is that the mechanism used to generate statistical probabilities is not the mechanism used to generate the statistical actuallity.

This is a very good point, except that in the one case in which financial data was provided, where a Dem dealership was practically swimming in it's own river of red ink and debt, it still stayed open while the Rep competition was closed. Add to that the fact that, while they're closing tons of dealerships, they're also opening 5 new ones (all Dem), and the "fiscal business reasons" arguement kind of goes up in smoke.

Drew, if your arguement is at all feasable, there should be dozens, if not hundreds, of cases where Reps kept their dealerships while the Dem competition was closed down. This means that your theory is testable. Go test it.

Noesis, if you believe this, you are nieve in the extreme. Pretty much whenever practical business and political backscratching cross paths, politics wins, no matter what party was involved.

 

One other small factor - while the Obama administration did force GM to change their CEO, and while the Obama administration did force both Chrysler and GM to undergo major restructuring and close many car delearships, the Obama administration did not get to pick specifically which ones stayed open and which ones closed. They did submit guidelines for what to look for when deciding which delearships to keep and which to close, and Drew has already listed a bunch of factors based on demographics and geography that show why these objective criteria would tend to favor Democrat areas of the country (e.g. by major markets).

The take home point here is that the Obama administration did not cherry pick all the Democrat owned car delearships to stay open. The Chrylser Board of Directors accepted the criteria submitted, and the ultimate decision of which ones to keep and which ones to close was done by Chrylser management.

EDIT:

Well Chrysler only has about 3000 delearships nationwide, and if only 10% of them are owned by Democrats, there's barely "hundreds" of Chrylser delearships owned by Democrats, never mind hundreds of delearships owned by Democrats that were shut down. Plus, all of that assumes that there is a random chance of each delearship closing, which is not the case. Delearships in larger markets (which typically have higher average incomes of people living nearby) were kept open preferentially. Since larger markets tend to have a higher percentage of Dems than Reps, it stands to reason that delearships near major markets have a disproportionally greater chance of being owned by a Democrat.

One more thing to point out - GM is going to go through the same process Chrysler just went through, and GM is a much larger company and has a much larger number of car delearships. It will be interesting to see what happens with them, although all things considered, I expect that the vast majority of GM dealerships that close will be Republican owned as well.