GM CEO Dan Akerson Says GM Is Not A Political Punching Bag

Sooner or later, it was going to come to this. GM’s successful rebound from the point of bankruptcy to the top selling car in the world was going to be claimed by Democrats and Republicans alike. We all knew this was coming.

From the seemingly innocent 2010 commercial presented above to the Superbowl commercials that prompted Ford to threaten to sue GM and Karl Rove proclaiming political bias, we’ve only just begun to see the political boxing match get underway.

AutoNews.com was seemingly the first to pick up on the political sparring that took place shortly after the SuperBowl when Karl Rove charged that Clint Eastwood’s commercial spot for the Chrysler Group that was set to be a tribute to the revival of domestic automakers.

Rove claimed “the President of the United States and his political minions are in essence using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.”  Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne quickly denied that the commercial was political, but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle and car manufacturers, principally GM, are destined to be in the middle until the government sells its 33 percent stake in the company.

The politics actually began at the Washington Auto Show in January when President Obama began taking credit by saying “there were some folks willing to let this industry die.”  This shot over the bow clearly showed Obama’s intent to use the car manufacturer’s resurgence as a political re-election point in his campaign.

Republicans are likely to point out that taxpayers funded the bailout and expected losses to the government are about $23.77 billion.

GM CEO Dan Akerson appeared before a congressional committee on Jan. 25, concerning Chevrolet Volt battery fires during NHTSA testing where Akerson said: “Although we loaded the Volt with state-of-the-art safety features, we did not engineer the Volt to be a political punching bag.” Akerson seemed to know that there were shots being fired across the bow and a full political battle was looming on the horizon.

GM North American President Mark Reuss shrugs off the political debate by saying “If they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it. There is nothing much I can do about it other than to be transparent and move on.”

It’s crystal clear that the American Automakers want to be out of the political crossfire but the politicians want the success of the industry to be directly in the middle of it. Fasten your seat belts, it’s only going to get worse from this point on.