The Tale of the Janesville Auto Plant (and the whole Ryan Speech Thing)

Paul Ryan has been attacking Barack Obama over the closure of the Janesville, Wisconsin GM plant in various speeches over the past few weeks, claiming that Obama clearly let them down after having “promised” to keep the plant open. This has been despite numerous fact-checking groups noting that the plant actually closed in December 2008 while George W. Bush was still in office.

Despite those pesky facts, Ryan repeated the charge in his Big Speech at the RNC in Tampa.

My home state voted for President Obama.  When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory. A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.

A little more nuanced and fleshed out than his stump speech, but basically the same-ol-same-ol.

Dems have jumped on Ryan for this, which has led to two defenses of his charge, one of them laughable, one of them a bit murkier but only on the surface.

The laughable defense is that Ryan isn’t really blaming Obama for the plant closure, but for the plant still being closed.  Here’s Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior Romney campaign advisor:

He didn’t talk about Obama closing the plant. He said that candidate Obama went there in 2008, and what he said was with government assistance, we can keep this plant open for another 100 years. Here we are four years into his administration. That plant is still closed. I think it’s a symbol of a recovery that hasn’t materialized for the people of Janesville, Wisconsin, just as it hasn’t materialized for Americans everywhere. […] I would encourage people to go back and look at what candidate Obama said in 2008. What he said was with his recovery program, with government assistance, we can keep that plant open for 100 years. Four years later, it’s still shuttered. I think it’s a symbol of a broken economy under this president.

And Brendan Ruck, a Ryan spokesman, says, “The issue is not when it stopped production, it’s that it’s still stopped.”

You can, maybe, parse that from what Ryan said at the RNC, but only if you ignore how he’s leveled the charge everywhere else.  In Ohio he said, “I remember President Obama visiting it when he was first running, saying he’ll keep that plant open. One more broken promise.” His other stump speech mentions of this have been along the same line.

Of course, Obama wasn’t president when the plant closed. And, of course, Ryan knows that.  But even if his literal meaning is now parsed to talk about why Janesville hasn’t reopened, the clearly implied message was that Obama was responsible for the closing in the first place.

And that’s where a quick visit to the timeline involved is useful.

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This article has a good list of the events around the plant controversy. I also did some research on it this morning, and it matches up. Here’s what spending far too much time on Google reveals:

January 2008:  Obama, as a candidate, visits Janesville. GM has been seriously struggling because, after “fat times” when it seemed like Americans would never stop buying SUVs and pick-up trucks, sharply rising gasoline prices had suddenly kicked out their legs from underneath them (though SUV sales had been dropping since 2004). The Janesville plant, of course, made SUVs and pick-ups (having stopped making small cars in 1990 so that it could be the birthplace of the Chevy Suburban SUV), and so was threatened with closure because GM simply couldn’t sell their product. And the day before the visit, GM had posted a $38 billion loss for 2007.

Obama said during that early campaign stop:

And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.  The question is not whether a clean energy economy is in our future, it’s where it will thrive.  I want it to thrive right here in the United States of America; right here in Wisconsin; and that’s the future I’ll fight for as your president.

Ryan elided that in his speech to ““I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.”  Which is telling and important, because Obama was talking about government assistance to GM to help get the plant producing more energy-efficient — and thus more commercially viable — product.

No such assistance was forthcoming from the Bush Administration for the rest of the year.

At the time, the economy is looking a bit shaky, with the clouds of a recession on the horizon from the housing/mortgage crisis.  Unemployment is at 5%, a scosh up from its 4.6% a year earlier.

June 2008:  The Great Recession is beginning to seriously kick off. Unemployment is up to 5.6%. GM is getting desperate, has hemorrhaged  $18.8 billion in the year to date, has seen SUV sales drop 30% in that same time, has pulled the plug on a full-sized SUV program it had already invested $2 billion in, and announces a new wave of plant closures — including Janesville, “the birth place of the big SUV,” scheduling it to shut down by the end of 2010, and closing a second shift of work immediately, losing 750 of the 2800 jobs at the plant.

Ryan and other local Congressfolk ask GM to reconsider the decision and retool Janesville for more viable vehicles. Obama blames the Bush Administration for not promoting production of energy-efficient vehicles, and promises an investment in green energy and to help auto makers retool for fuel efficiency.

October 2008: GM is sinking faster than even pessimists expected. Unemployment is at 6.5%. Those Americans with jobs — who bought 2 million cars in 2007 with home equity loans — simply can’t get credit to buy new autos, assuming they feel secure enough to even try.

GM announces an early closure for Janesville.  The plant will stop producing SUVs in December — it’s only producing 100 per day at this point, while a year earlier it was producing 1,700.

Obama says the early closure shows that Washington needs to live up to its commitments, and pledges as president to “help lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

December 2008: On schedule, SUV production stops, and about 1200 remaining employees are laid off.  The remaining 100 or so are kept on to finish work on a contract making medium-duty trucks — 50 on the line, another 50 for general plant operations.

Bush convinces Congress to okay an auto industry bail-out, allocating $13.4 billion from the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief (TARP) program for GM (and another $4 billion for Chrysler), to be paid in January/February 2009. Ryan supports the measure; Romney suggests that Detroit should be allowed to go bankrupt.

January 2009: Barack Obama is sworn in as president.  Unemployment stands at 7.8%. The Federal government ends up using $24.9 billion of TARP  to loan to GM and Chrysler.

April 2009: The truck line closes, as expected, laying off the 100 remaining workers at the plant.

June 2009:Unemployment is at 9.5% (it will peak at 10%). GM declares bankruptcy.

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So, are the fact-checkers correct about the Janesville plant closing during the Bush Administration?

On the one hand, the nay-sayers are correct that the final closure of the plant, the closing of the small number of people left on one line, took place in April 2009.

On the other hand, the actual decision to close the plant was already made by June 2008, was in fact accelerated in October, and 95% of the plant (based on headcount) was shut down by December, with only a residual contract for a remaining four months.  There was no active plant and workforce to retool and refocus by the time the Obama Administration was in place, even if on Day 1 their top priority was the Janesville GM plant. (And, of course, in the context of GOP complaints about Obama “picking winners and losers,” it would have been inappropriate to dictate to GM that they should “pick” Janesville for some extraordinary intervention once they had received make-or-break bail out loans.)

Further, by that time, the economy as a whole was literally in the crapper, car sales were down globally, GM was six months from bankruptcy, and the entire context of Obama’s campaign speech — supportive retooling of existing, operating plants to produce more energy-efficient vehicles — no longer existed.  The threat to the auto industry and its employees was no longer tactical, even strategic — it was existential.

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Based on all of that, I have no problem saying that Ryan’s assertion (or even call it a strong implication) that Obama held some responsibility for the Janesville plant closure was incorrect — and intentionally so.

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Two final comments.

1. Crafting this post has doubtless taken more hours than it was actually worth, but once I was tracking this stuff down, it was hard to break free. A lot of passages were written and rewritten as I got new or refined info, so apologies for any grammatical errors in revised sentences.
2. I think I managed to write this all without once typing “Jaynestown” instead of “Janesville”.  With due apologies to the beleaguered citizens of the latter, that was a non-trivial effort.