Obama blasts Chrysler investors, stands behind company’s workers

I was fascinated at the little I caught of the President’s news conference today in which he blasted some of the Chrysler debt-holders and openly stated he was standing behind the autoworkers at Chrysler and elsewhere as he announced a bankruptcy reorganization for the troubled automaker.

His specific comment about a group of hedge fund investors went something like this:

“They were hoping that everybody else would make sacrifices and they would have to make none. Some demanded twice the return that other lenders were getting. I don’t stand with them. I stand with Chrysler’s employees and their families and communities. I stand with Chrysler’s management, its dealers and its suppliers. I stand with the millions of Americans who own and want to buy Chrysler cars.”

Let me be the first to inform you if you’ve missed the obvious here: President Obama can play politics with the best of ‘em, and at least part of that statement (and his news conference in general) was purely political.

I was as stirred as many others probably were who were watching that live announcement of the Chrysler bankruptcy, sure I was. Many people, myself included, probably thought something like, “At last, Obama’s getting tough with these fat cat investors who’ve decimated our nation since last fall in one way or another. At last, Obama’s applying some sort of serious metaphorical “acne treatments” to the nasty boils and blemishes of Wall Street largess that’s hurt us all here on Main Street.”

Or something like that.

Then I ran onto a short L.A. Times business report on the whole statement and whole Chrysler deal that was published about an hour after the President’s statement. I discovered the lenders Obama accused of submarining the Chrysler deal included a group of 20 hedge funds that manager, among other things, teachers’ pension funds and other workers’ pension funds. According to the L.A. Times account, some of these smaller groups had offered earlier this week to take a 40% loss on their investments, but that had been rejected by the federal government negotiators.

So — what’s really the story here? I suppose that it might be something like this: Major American automakers ought to be saved, and hopefully will be saved, but the picture is ALWAYS complicated beyond what we see and hear in the media, because the picture always includes politics.

Now excuse me as I get back to reading my papers. Haven’t seen the comics page yet today.