Posted: 03 Jun 2011 11:38 AM PDT

When Chrysler announced at the end of April that it repaid most of its $10.5 billion loan from the federal government, Democrats seized on the opportunity to declare the unpopular bailout a success story. The Chrysler announcement, combined with General Motors’ (GM) previous claim that it had already paid back half of its $50 billion bailout, has put the auto companies in a unique position for the 2012 election cycle.
In other words, all signs point toward GM becoming a major talking point in the 2012 election cycle. But don’t expect the GM leadership to be particularly enthusiastic about being a poster child of a Democratic agenda — even though that particular party is the one that saved them from further financial disaster.
“No one at GM is happy” that it is “going to be used as one of President Obama’s success stories,” a source familiar with the internal dynamics of GM’s business told The Daily Caller, adding that the car company is not exactly on the same page as the White House in terms of declaring victory.
“Nothing about the president’s call was popular,” Geithner continued. “It may have been more politically expedient to let Chrysler fail. But the president knew that if Chrysler collapsed, tens of thousands of jobs would have been shed in the near term — a body blow to an economy already on the ropes.”
But the strategy of using the auto bailouts as a policy achievement could backfire. Brian Lunde, a former campaign manager and executive, told TheDC that bringing up the auto bailouts won’t help at the polls.
“I don’t think Democrats should want to talk about what voters perceive as unpopular,” said Lunde, who became a George W. Bush supporter later in his career. “The preconceived belief [of the bailout] is negative.”
Moreover, said Lunde, the “fine print of the bailout is a can of worms. The more you know, the worse it looks.”
That return is already lower than expected. In a report issued Wednesday by the president’s National Economic Council, the government is slated to lose $14 billion in taxpayer money from the $80 billion auto bailout given to Chrysler and GM.
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