From Bloomberg:
Obama Gets Credit for Jobs in Michigan Where Voters Disapprove
By David J. Lynch
Sep 12, 2011 9:15 AM CT
Wes Smith probably would have lost his family-owned company if it weren’t for one of President Barack Obama’s signature economic policies: the $82 billion bailout of General Motors Co. (GM) and Chrysler Group LLC.
“I could be out of business,” Smith said. “Do I think about that often? Absolutely.”
Instead, E&E Manufacturing Co., the Plymouth, Mich., auto- parts maker Smith’s father-in-law founded in 1962, is rebounding from the depths of the financial crisis. Annual sales of about $75 million are up about 50 percent from their nadir. The company has added about 70 jobs since employment bottomed at 280, down from a pre-crisis high of 480.
E&E’s resurgence is part of a broader auto-industry comeback that analysts say vindicates the government’s activism in financing and arranging the 2009 GM and Chrysler bankruptcies.
While Republicans assailed the intervention as evidence of Obama’s addiction to state-centric solutions, the industry has added almost 133,000 U.S. jobs since its 2009 low point, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the U.S. government has recovered all but $1.3 billion of the $12.5 billion it spent to prop up Auburn Hills, Michigan-based Chrysler, now controlled by Italy’s Fiat SpA, and almost half of the $49.5 billion devoted to GM in Detroit.
“It was one of the better policy responses to the financial panic and recession,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics Inc. in West Chester, Pennsylvania. The auto industry “is one of the more powerful sources of growth in the recovery.”
Political Dividends
One thing the industry’s Lazarus-like revival hasn’t done, however, is pay political dividends for Obama.
“I have no faith in this administration,” said Smith, 55, criticizing what he said is the president’s failure to encourage corporate investment in the U.S.
The sour grapes aren’t limited to Republicans such as Smith. In the latest EPIC-MRA poll of Michigan voters, 65 percent gave Obama a negative job-performance rating -- worse than the 50 percent disapproval mark in the latest national Gallup poll. Even a majority of traditionally Democratic union households in Michigan gave Obama a thumbs-down.
James Mead, 46, hired as a welder after six months of unemployment, shrugs at the president’s role in saving companies like his new employer.
“I think it’s something the government had to do,” he said in an interview. “If they didn’t and the auto industry collapsed, we would have had a depression.”
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