Did Chrysler Kill "Republican" Dealers, Or What?
TTAC’s Best and Brightest spent some time this weekend examining the question of whether or not Chrysler and GM needed to terminate nearly 2000 dealers between them, both pro and con. We didn’t look at WHICH dealers got the axe, for two reasons. First, despite receiving nearasdammit $20 billion in taxpayer money (so far), GM has steadfastly refused to release a list of the 1100 dealers emailed their walking papers. The Huffington Post blog (of all people) has a partial tally, but GM ain’t gonna spill. Which, if you think about it, protects car dealers at the expense of taxpayers, who might not know they’re buying a car from a dead dealer trading. Bastardos! That said, when GM’s Marketing Maven, Mark LeNeve, announced the cull, he claimed that the business brains who made the cut based their decisions largely (if not exclusively) on volume. Chrysler, in contrast, produced a list of the dispossessed—and it’s all over the show. Urban, suburban, large, small, medium; the logic underpinning their choices is an enigma wrapped in a “Dear John” email. Or is it? The internets are abuzz with the tin foil hat-wearing theory that the cuts were made based on partisan politics. Check it out . . .
After receiving a tip about the possibility of political considerations affecting, The Free Republic did a little test.
I took all dealer owners whose names appeared more than once in the list. And, of those who contributed to political campaigns, every single one had donated almost exclusively to GOP candidates. While this isn’t an exhaustive review, it does have some ominous implications if it can be verified . . .
Consider the partial list of Chrysler dealership owners, listed below. You’ll notice that all were opponents of Barack Obama, most through sponsorship of GOP candidates and organizations, but a handful through Barack’s Democrat rivals (Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in 2008, for example).
• Vernon G. Buchanan: $147,450 to GOP candidates and organizations
Bottom line (or not):
I have thus far found only a single Obama donor (and a minor one at that: $200 from Jeffrey Hunter of Waco, Texas) on the closing list.
Even if this is a simple reflection of your average car dealer’s political leaning, there’s a lot of confusion out there amongst ex-Chrysler dealers as to why some got the chop and others didn’t. As you’d expect, as Automotive News reports, emotions are running high.
“I’m too stubborn to quit, and I’m too stupid to go away,” said the owner of Richard Chrysler-Jeep-Dodge in the western Chicago suburb of St. Charles. “I’m going to keep selling cars and fight this to the end.”
“We don’t fit the guidelines for closure,” Massarelli said. “We’re profitable, we’ve never missed a payment and we’ve done everything Chrysler has ever asked us to help them out.”
“Every time Chrysler said they needed us, we were there for them,” Massarelli said. “Now they won’t even return my calls.”
From a PR perspective, this is a channel stuffed with not good. Severed Chrysler dealers are making a fuss in Congress and federal bankruptcy court, where they’re trying to halt Judge Arthur Gonzalez’ approval (on Wednesday) of the asset sale which will create “new” Chrysler. Perhaps this is a disinformation campaign. Perhaps not. Either way, even if the fix (as in canine fertility) was in, it doesn’t look like they’re going to stop the train from leaving the station.
More by Robert Farago
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Nobody does political statistical analysis better than FiveThirtyEight.com. His backstory on wikipedia makes for very interesting reading, and gives another look at how the traditional media is getting trounced on quality by the best of modern bloggers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight.com
Let me get this right - the Task Force goes to a whole lot of trouble to protect the unions, then uses unidentifiable and (un-articulated)criteria to simply "lop off a chunk" from a group that are statistically opposed to the guy that formed the task force. Yeah, I got no problem with that...