Dan Neil Is Insane

Dan Neil’s April 2005 review of the Pontiac G6 ended by calling for fresh blood at the top of GM. His comments triggered the GM advertising boycott that inspired TTAC’s General Motors Death Watch. As you might expect, the Pulitzer-prize winning carmudgeon has a few things to say about GM’s bankruptcy. But I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that GM’s most famous (and talented) nemesis would mark the occasion by suggesting that failing to fully support Al Gore’s bid for the U.S. presidency was the company’s ultimate undoing. No really. Writing in the LA Times, Neil claims that “by backing Gore, who had the support of organized labor, GM would have gained enormous goodwill with the United Auto Workers, goodwill it desperately needed as it attempted to downsize in the new century. Gore also argued for universal healthcare, a program that, had it become reality, might have relieved GM and the other domestic carmakers of that burden . . .

A Gore administration also would have raised fuel economy standards for carmakers and instituted a significant tax on gasoline; either move would probably have blunted GM’s continuing and foredoomed reliance on the full-size truck and SUV market. As it was, the board’s pro-business patricians actively opposed the Gore candidacy. The irony is that the Big Government Democrat might have saved GM from the eventual ignominy of bankruptcy and government ownership.

Ironic indeed, in the traditional sense of marking the discrepancy between expectation and anything remotely resembling reality. Equally lamentable Neil is one with the GM company line that it was well on its way to a product-led turnaround when cruel fate intervened.

In the midst of turning the ship around, GM hit not one but three icebergs: the sudden collapse of the U.S. auto market, the sharp spike in gas prices and the crisis in credit.

Luckily, Neil then sails back into better charted waters—exploring the effects of GM’s bureaucracy on its ability to do, well, anything. And then he really runs aground.

Neil believes, as many do, that GM will emerge from the bankruptcy process “smaller, leaner, smarter and hungrier.” But where is the evidence for that assertion? Common sense? “Bankruptcy’s purifying fire will burn away debt and, as important, a legacy of comfortable arrogance.”

Listening to Fritz Henderson speak today, talking about how “natural attrition” will do all the necessary executive housecleaning, I call bullshit.