Del. Mark Keam and U.S. Rep Gerry Connolly were appointed to the Obama re-electon campaign's 'Virginia Truth Team' this week, joining Rep. Jim Moran and a host of other Democrats to aid in spreading Obama's campaign message and responding to attacks from his opponents.
After narrowly carrying Virginia in 2008, the Obama campaign expects a tough race this year, especially after Republicans took control of the General Assembly last year. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell is also often mentioned as for Mitt Romney.
"President Obama’s record should speak for itself," Del. Scott Surovell (Fairfax) said in a press release. "[B]etween the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, preventing a complete collapse of the economy, ending the War in Iraq, saving the auto industry, the capture of Osama Bin Laden, raising fuel efficiency standards, repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell," and reforming the financial sector, the president and his administration have a lot to be proud of."
Other Northern Virginia democrats on the team include Surovel, Sen. Adam Ebbin (Alexandria), Del. Charniele Herring (Alexandria), former Sen. Mary Margaret Whipple (Arlington) and Fairfax County Democratic Committee Chair Cesar del Aguila, according to the Washington Post.
But you're right to never buy a Chrysler product. The three brands under their umbrella - Jeep, Dodge, and Chrysler - are consistently the bottom 3 in the JD Power Initial Quality Survey. Outside the general public fallacy that "imports are always more reliable than domestic", the industry had bigger issues to work out than just supply-demand, and they've made some of those hard choices with respect to unions, partnerships, and off-shoring. A bigger problem at GM and Chrysler was management - and the government can't fix that. All credit and respect to Ford for making hard decisions in the past few years, including mortgaging the blue oval at one point, to offset debt and invest in the right technologies and management - they avoided taking government money and are consistently beating out imports in JD Power and Consumer Reports design and quality surveys.
The neverending cycle continues. Brace yourself for median signs.
The reason why Ford did not need the bailout, but GM (and Chrysler did) is Ford crashed earlier when it was possible to borrow money. GM needed the money in the fall of 2008 when none was available. The total bailout was about 85 billion; all but 14 billion were paid back. WIth 200,000 GM employees, the cost to the taxpayer for the the unemployment (about 20 billion) and lost taxes (about 2 billion) far exceeds the cost of the bailout.
Mark Twain