By Matthew DeBord of The Big Money
The Big Money’s Chadwick Matlin and I were trading email a few days ago about Obama and Saturn. He made an excellent point: that Saturn is a very Obama kind of car brand. Or was, anyway. Back when Saturn burst onto the scene—and burst is the correct word, because Saturn really was something different in the U.S. car business—it sold cars that were technologically innovative, yet relatively modest in size (they kind of created a new category of downsized mid-size sedans) and sold through dedicated dealerships that embraced a no-haggle philosophy and asked employees to wear polo shirts, which they happily did. They also got pretty good gas mileage and were built in Tennessee, where General Motors and the UAW struck a forward-looking but ultimately doomed partnership. The idea was to beat the Japanese on American soil, with American labor and very smart American marketing.
This is essentially Obama’s vision for the entire industry. He wants the Big Three (or whatever is left of them) to form the leading edge of a green-manufacturing revolution, producing the technologically advanced, fuel-efficient, low-emissions automobiles of the future. But he doesn’t want a massive rollback of UAW gains—just a more evolved relationship under which union members accept that it isn’t 1955 anymore.
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