‘The crisis would be Obama’s first order of business’
If life’s about timing, Barack Obama’s was a touch unfortunate.
Lehman Brothers Holdings announced it would file for bankruptcy in September 2008. Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States in January 2009. Whether he liked it or not, dealing with the biggest economic meltdown since the Depression would be his first order of business – ready and waiting for him just as soon as he’d unpacked his box files and set his computer desktop image (a Hawaiian beach scene, I imagine, given the stress of the job and the fact that he spent his formative years on the island, surfing and studying).
The Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was the moment the ominous distant rumblings of economic catastrophe cracked into a storm. Though the writing had been on the wall for months, if not years, it was the events of that day that would lead – less than a week later – to the secretary of the Treasury, the chair of the Federal Reserve and the speaker of the House of Representatives gathering to talk numbers. Big numbers. Numbers like $700bn.
As you may have guessed, I’ve been killing time this month with Obama’s A Promised Land. It’s a great book, and if you’re accusing me of diving headlong into some sickly-sweet nostalgia to escape this year’s persistent madness… well, guilty.
Around the book’s halfway point, Obama paints a nice little vignette of a lighter moment in those dark months of endless work, late nights and terrifying uncertainty. Brian Deese, one of the youngest members of Obama’s auto industry task force, has just played a blinder, pitching his case for saving Chrysler, the smallest of the imperilled Big Three, not with numbers, graphs and spreadsheets but with a map. On it he’s marked 20 or so Chrysler plants across the Midwest – a stark representation of the communities that’ll be devastated should those plants close, and of the thousands of Americans who’d lose their livelihoods. The map strikes a chord with Obama, who spent time with laid-off steel workers on the campaign trail earlier in his career: folks whose faces he describes as ‘betraying the quiet desperation of men who’d lost their purpose’.
Obama vows not to let Chrysler go under, and Deese – delighted – chips in with the fact that, if a Fiat-Chrysler deal can be brokered, then the alliance stands a good chance of being the first US-based operation capable of producing cars able to cover 40 miles per gallon. Only in his excitement he says ‘the first US-produced cars that can go forty miles per hour…’ His error prompts an outbreak of tired but happy chuckling.
How times have – and haven’t – changed. FCA is no more, Sergio Marchionne (whose interest in Chrysler was key to saving it) is gone and much of America still loves the trucks Obama hoped to steer it away from. But, with the likes of Rivian’s R1T and Ford’s F-150 Lightning, the great American pick-up is going electric. And if you’d have said that in the White House one night back in 2009, you’d have prompted an outbreak of tired but happy chuckling.
Enjoy the issue.