Death squad for Republican dealers? Not true, according to the records.
In rapid fire succession, this writer was recipient of three emails from divergent but known conservative friends–one a former journalist–with an apparent widely circulated though un-sourced report alleging that politics determined which Chrysler dealer franchises got the axe in the reborn company’s bankruptcy proceedings earlier this year.
According to this lengthy email rant, all but one of the 789 dealers whose franchises were discontinued under the new Chrysler LLC bankruptcy were picked not by company analysts but rather by White House Democratic Party henchmen because they had donated to the Republican Party.
“Why was there neither rhyme nor reason as to which dealerships of the Chrysler Corporation (sic) were to be closed,” the email message asked rhetorically. A few lines later, it answered its own question this way: “Amazingly, of the 789 dealerships closed by the federal government 788 had donated money exclusively to Republican political causes while contributing nothing to Democratic political causes.”
Let me be blunt. The preceding statement is pure 100% bunk, a cheap partisan trick planted either by extremists of the Right or by super-clever Leftists trying to make it look that way. Now I’m a long-term Centrist and I say Fie on Both Their Houses.
The false statement was attributed to The Washington Examiner, Newsmax, Fox New (sic) “and a host of other news agencies.” According to a Chrysler spokeswoman, the rumor first surfaced last May on the heels of Congressional hearings in which some members sought to intervene in the Federal bankruptcy proceedings. I was unable to verify if The Washington Examiner, a free newspaper handed out to Metro subway riders and dropped unsolicited on some DC-area lawns, had ever run such a story.
Chrysler’s official statement reads: “The process Chrysler LLC used to evaluate dealers was a thorough, rigorous process that used a data-driven metric which included the following factors: minimum sales responsibility; a scorecard that measured sales, share, shipments, customer satisfaction index, service satisfaction index and warranty repair; facility (capacity, Millennium II standards); location (optimum retail area); management; was the dealer dualed with a competing manufacturer, did the dealer sell all three Chrysler Group brands under one roof and the market’s total sales potential. The process was thoroughly vetted, applied to all dealers consistently and the results were extensively reviewed by a team of people within the company.
“Neither the White House nor the U.S. Treasury were involved in the selection or rejection of dealers. As the U.S. Treasury provided interim Debtor In Possession (DIP) financing, they were notified of the timeline of this announcement and provided with an overview of the matrix and overall number of rejected dealers that resulted from the use of the matrix. Neither the White House nor the U.S. Treasury Department in any way adjusted the criteria used to select or reject dealers.”
Further, The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington-based think tank, issued a six-page “backgrounder” on July 8 that concluded, “Research by The Heritage Foundation shows no evidence that the dealership termination process was influenced by partisanship.” It noted that “Of more concern are claims that the decision as to which dealers were terminated was itself skewed so that Republican-leaning dealers were treated more harshly than those that supported Democrats. This is a serious charge.”
So the Foundation’s analysts identified all 789 Chrysler dealerships that were closed and the 2,392 that will remain open and affiliated with Chrysler. Then they ran a cross-check against all political donations on record in the 1990-2008 election cycles. They found, not unexpectedly, that GOP donors outnumbered Dem donors in both groups while the second largest category donated to both parties; overall, only 19-27% of closed dealerships donated at all to political causes. And the amounts donated, averaging in four figures, were not notably large, but surviving dealerships donations were generally higher than those tossed out, likely because they were more successful to begin with.
“Claims that the method by which dealers were selected was biased appear to be unfounded, with no correlation between political contributions and terminations,” The Heritage Foundation wound up.
TheDetroitBureau.com is happy to squelch such a political hoax, particularly when it relates to the auto industry. Remember, as I have written before to a number of friends taken in by such hocum, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”