David Brooks's take on the political difficulties of enforcing a real restructuring plan on Detroit is largely correct:By enmeshing the White House so deeply into G.M., Obama has increased the odds that March’s menacing threat will lead to June’s wobbly wiggle-out. The Obama administration and the Democratic Party are now completely implicated in the coming G.M. wreck. Over the next few months, the White House will be subject to a gigantic lobbying barrage. The Midwestern delegations, swing states all, will pull out all the stops to prevent plant foreclosures. Unions will be furious if the Obama-run company rips up the union contract. Is the White House ready for the headline “Obama to Middle America: Drop Dead”? It would take a party with a political death wish to see this through.On the other hand, that's not so different from how it is now. The continued bailouts of G.M. are the product of the same political calculation and the same chorus of Midwestern voices.Brooks goes on to argue that the likeliest outcome "is some semiserious restructuring plan, with or without court involvement, to be followed by long-term government intervention and backdoor subsidies forever. That will amount to the world’s most expensive jobs program." I seriously doubt that last bit. The virtue of the G.M. bailouts is that, in the current economic climate, they're actually a very cheap jobs program. The jobs already exist. The buildings already exist. The managers are already in place. The workers are already trained. Amidst the absent demand of a recession, preserving existing jobs is almost always much cheaper than creating new ones. And that probably goes double for preserving jobs at an employer of such economic and psychological consequences as G.M. In the short-term, it's probably much easier to G.M.'s employees -- and the other companies and businesses that depend on them -- in place then try to find and develop new work for all of them.But the recession won't last forever. And then Brooks's question regains its force: If G.M. can never sustain itself, will we ever be able to let it unwind?
