Bailout Watch 263: Dodd: "Bring Me the Head of Rick Wagoner"
In his selfless campaign to save Detroit from, uh, Detroit, Senator Christopher Dodd launched a failure-seeking missile at GM. Needless to say, it had GM CEO Rick Wagoner’s name on it. “You’ve got to consider new leadership,” Dodd told “Face the Nation,” referring to GM not CBS (one presumes). Dodd said Red Ink Rick “has to move on.” Now get this: “GM spokesman Steve Harris said he didn’t interpret Dodd’s comments as making Wagoner’s exit a condition for aid, adding that the company management, employees and dealers ‘all feel like Rick is the right guy to lead us at difficult time.'” Is “difficult time” the opposite of “playtime?” And how else would you interpret Dodd’s remark? When the Senator said, “piss off Wagoner” he actually meant “please continue running GM into the ground so we can blow $15b+ of our taxpayers’ money on this doomed enterprise?” And if Harris really didn’t get the message– a completely fantastic proposition, but there you go– President elect Barack Obama offered NBC dark hints about Wagoner’s curtain call…
“Asked on ‘Meet the Press’ (hihowareya?) whether the management of the [bailout begging] automaker should be allowed to stay, [Obama] said ‘it may not be the same for all the companies.'” What’s the bet none of the CEOs involved are imitating donkey’s response to Shrek’s request for volunteers to confront Lord Farquar (i.e Oh! Pick me! Pick me!)? And just in case Obama’s comment was too straighforward for the electorate, Obama added the appropriate qualifiers at a Chicago press conference.
“Obama said that if the management team “that’s currently in place doesn’t understand the urgency of the situation and is not willing to make the tough choices and adapt to these new circumstances, then they should go. If, on the other hand, they are willing, able and show themselves committed to making those important changes, then that raises a different situation.”
Oh for NSFW’s sake. Has this guy ever met a fence he doesn’t like to sit on? Meanwhile, Dodd said sayonara to the smallest of the Big 2.8. “Chrysler, is, I think, basically gone, probably ought to be merged.” Meanwhile… “The last thing I want to see is the auto industry disappear,” Obama said. Translation: not fade away. You know, entirely. Yet.
More by Robert Farago
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Fact is, Rick Wagoner is everything we think he is, namely a boorish, xenophobic, disconnected patrician with a grating personality in public. Kinda like Nixon, but without the blue collar chip-on-the-shoulder. Politicians, being expert on exploiting other people, detect this about the guy. Its why someone like Carl Levin keeps his relationship with the Wags on the down-low but politico folks outside of Michigan like tearing into him for a photo-opp; Wagoner's easy meat. Note that the Senators couldn't score easy hits on the petro-CEO's when they were getting McCarthy'ed over the "outrageous profits" of those halcyon $3 a gallon days way back in....June. I know this because there is no poster-boy of Evil Oil in the Zeitgeist. Most people have no idea who runs XOM. That's probably because the CEO's of the big petroleums are competent, articulate people who really know the oil business and can articulate that in a public forum, even under criticism from political hacks. This leads to no easy sound-bites for either the Senator to make, or a verbal caricature of the CEO making a mockery of himself in the public record. No fun for Dodd there. Wagoner though, that's easy money.
I hate to sound like a moron, but WTF does NSFW mean? I am seeing it in article after article and I still haven't been able to determine what it means based on context.