President Obama and the Auto Industry

Back from vacation, I'm catching up on things I missed last week. Dan Ikenson did a fine job on President Obama's boasting about how he saved the automobile industry. But a few days later Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's "Fact Checker," was more brutal:

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.

Here's a sample of the specific analyses:

“GM plans to hire back all of the workers they had to lay off during the recession.”

This is another impressive-sounding but misleading figure. In the five years since 2006, General Motors announced that it would reduce its workforce by nearly 68,000 hourly and salary workers, creating a much smaller company. Those are the figures that generated the headlines.

Obama is only talking about a sliver of workers — the 9,600 workers who were laid off in the fourth quarter of 2008.

And that's why President Obama's speech was awarded Three Pinocchios.