President Obama may be seeing some bad mojo in internal polls. He has pivoted hard from massive fundraising a week ago, including five fundraisers on Friday alone, to a trip to Oklahoma to tout half a pipeline that he has publicly fought against, and swung through Nevada to tout solar energy and recommit his efforts to bankroll alternative energy via taxpayer dollars. If you oppose those efforts, said the president, you might belong in a “flat earth society.”
From there the president has attempted to spin one of his most visible failures as, well, not his fault. Solyndra, says the president, was really the other guys’ problem.
The solar energy start-up Solyndra, which had been the poster child of Obama’s initiative, went bankrupt in 2011, putting 1,000 employees out of work. It had received more than $500 million in federal loan guarantees through a Recovery Act program. The loan process is now the subject of a congressional investigation.
“Obviously, we wish Solyndra hadn’t gone bankrupt,” Obama said. “But understand: This was not our program per se.”
“Congress — Democrats and Republicans — put together a loan guarantee program because they understood historically that when you get new industries, it’s easy to raise money for start-ups, but if you want to take them to scale, oftentimes there’s a lot of risk involved, and what the loan guarantee program was designed to do was to help start up companies get to scale,” he said.
Solyndra applied for a government-backed loan during the Bush years, and was rejected. It returned and applied for a similar loan after Obama’s inauguration, and was accepted. Solyndra’s main financial backer, George Kaiser, had personally donated $53,000 to Obama’s presidential campaign. He and other Solyndra officials visited the Obama White House on several occasions. Obama returned the favor and personally visited Solyndra’s HQ to announce the government loan, a visit that some administration officials warned could turn out to be an embarrassment for the president. The president did not listen to those advisers. The loan that Solyndra got came from Obama’s stimulus package. It also fit with his overall agenda to push America over to alternative energy sources regardless of the cost or whether those sources are ready to bear the load of our modern economy.
In the background as Solyndra fell apart, Obama White House officials worked with Solyndra on its public relations. Solyndra people offered a White House official a corporate gig. The Obama Department of Energy wanted to give Solyndra even more taxpayer money.
Solyndra is Obama’s scandal alone. Its failure is his failure. Its waste of our money is his, too. If the Tatler was SportsNation, I would put Barack Obama up on the Liar Board for trying to spread the blame for this expensive debacle. He deserves a pile of Pinocchios for it.
– yourself, Mr. President; it’s your doing.
Managed to get that backward, too.
There are classic problems of scale: growing too fast and running out of cash, and outrunning your management expertise. Loan guarantees could help with the first, but Solyndra still had too many of the second.
I believe it was basically a technical mistake and/or fraud from day one. In the event, it was overtaken by much cheaper technologies, not to mention offshore manufacture. They will moan that they were also overtaken by oil *not* going to $200/barrel, poor babies, but really that wasn’t going to matter when all competing solar technologies were more efficient.
I’ll give him this, he is telling the story as he understands it.
Mostly.
That doesn’t make it true.
Obambus seems extremely skilled at knowing just enough to be dangerous, and not enough to be aware of the fact.
I don’t know the exact history of these programs, but I can take some wild guesses on how they got GOP support if they did get such support, and if I am right there are some useful lessons to be had, namely—that when you either refuse to combat liberal pressures because you can’t take the heat the press will give you if you did, OR you think that reelection via earmark pork is okay, but otherwise don’t care about what is being funded–well, in either case you still funded whatever it is that failed, and a Democrat will still blame you for the debacle that his side basically caused (either by the pressure group, or by slanting the media and the education establishment so that earmarks were felt to be the only way you could survive).
My guess is that if the GOP caved less and fought more they would both do better in the long run and would not hand guys like Obama a chance to do things like what this post is about. More statesmanship that says “no”, less cowering. The GOP might actually go far if that became the routine.
And yes, I do think I could do better.
As an amplification on the earmark/pork thing–a few years back Ponnuru at NRO kept asking what the real harm was done by earmarking. Well, here it is–because who doubts that the logrolling needed for earmarking helps allow things like Solyndra?
Earmarking just so you can buy votes removes your abilities to criticize bad financial stewardship by the other guy–because you probably had to vote for one of his stupid boondoggles in order to get him to vote for yours.
And yes, Solyndra was not an earmark, but it is the atmosphere caused by pork and earmark that makes it hard to stop things like the program Solyndra was on. Or at least stop them from giving the money amounts given, which really are inappropriate unless it is a truly critical defense industry item that is produced in small numbers and is one that has basically zero commercial applications (in which case it should be a cost plus development contract with DMCA oversight not a loan. Certainly not one for hundreds of millions.)
The government really should not be in the venture capital business. “Angel investing” levels are probably more suitable, and involves less picking of winners and losers, and less market distortion.
“pivoted”
I’ve come to really loathe that word. It’s come to mean, “let’s change our story to a new lie.”
It wasn’t bipartisan, it way “buy partisan”.
Obama is a pathological liar.
Thanks for the clarification.
I thought Barry said, “My part in the Solyndra failure …”