Obama's no-good, very bad day.

Obama really had a horrible day on Wednesday. I personally would have been rooting through the presidential liquor cabinet that night.

On Tuesday, a member of his National Economic Council, Jim Owens, says that his company, Caterpillar, will be able to rehire some of the 22,000 laid off workers at their production facilities if the stimulus bill passes. That same day, the stimulus bill passes the senate.

Wednesday, Obama flies to Peoria to make an impromptu appearance at a Caterpillar facility to tout his stimulus bill, and reiterate Owen's decision to rehire the laid off workers, now that the stimulus bill has passed. While Air Force One is in route to Peoria, Obama's pick for commerce secretary withdraws his name for consideration.

After Obama's speech, Jim Owens says that there is a strong possibility of more lay offs before Caterpillar will be in a position to call back affected workers, indicating that the soonest the latter action can occur would be toward the end of the third quarter, or fourth quarter.

GM II

This is more of a trial balloon than established fact, though it is interesting in its implications.

DETROIT — President Obama has dropped the idea of appointing a single, powerful “car czar” to oversee the revamping of General Motors and Chrysler and will instead keep the politically delicate task in the hands of his most senior economic advisers, a top administration official said Sunday night.

Mr. Obama is designating the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, and the chairman of the National Economic Council, Lawrence H. Summers, to oversee a presidential panel on the auto industry. Mr. Geithner will also supervise the $17.4 billion in loan agreements already in place with G.M. and Chrysler, said the official, who insisted on anonymity.

[...]

“We’re going to need a restructuring of these companies,” the adviser, David Axelrod, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. He added that a turnaround of the companies would “require sacrifice not just from the auto workers but also from creditors, from shareholders and the executives who run the company.”

Considering that the National Economic Council includes my boss, who just laid me off, I'll go ahead and assume that their advice will be to break the union.

However, the thrust of this post is that this will mean either the bank plan; taxpayers assume all the bad stuff, including retiree pensions and the like, and GM gets off scot free, or it's nationalized, and taxpayers assume all the bad stuff anyway. I really don't see any middle ground. Unlike the banks, I don't see anybody else in the market who is in the position to buy up GM's assets, even at pennies on the dollar, so unless Buffet wants to take a crack at making cars, I think you pretty much have to nationalize the company.