IN LIFE THERE ARE NO GUARANTEES…UNLESS YOU’RE PALS WITH POLITICIANS

10/4/11

One of the big stories, and clubs with which the GOP will beat President Obama over the head in the upcoming presidential campaign, is the Solyndra deal. As readers doubtless know, Solyndra is a solar panel company, controlled by a non-profit run by an ardent, financial and otherwise, supporter of the President, that received a $500mm loan guarantee and then went bankrupt, sticking the taxpayers with substantial, though not yet quantified, losses. This could be quite a political club if the taxpayers were paying attention, but the case involves a lot of detail, and asking an American public addled with the likes of “Dancing with the Stars” and “American Idol” to pay the slightest attention to any detail is a non-starter, but I digress.

Charges are flying that the Solyndra guarantee was hurried, despite several warning flags of impending financial doom, in order to enable the Obama White House to “…secure a policy or political victory,” as Representative Cliff Sterns, R. Fla., put it. There is even talk, and not unsubstantiated talk, that review of the project was hurried in order to enable Vice-President Biden to announce the guarantee on a planned trip to a Solyndra facility. In effect, the due diligence was timed to fit the announcement rather than the announcement’s being timed to accommodate the due diligence. Such a backasswards approach makes no sense in the real world in which people actually invest their own, or their shareholders’, money but makes perfect sense in the bizzaro world of modern politics, in which pols invest your money for their benefit but, again, I digress.

That Solyndra crashed, burned, and took your money with it is no surprise. The history of industrial policy, i.e., of government picking winners and losers, is a decidedly mixed one at best. There probably is nothing incredibly profound to say about the wider aspects of this sorry, but not atypical, case. What is enlightening, or at least a bit surprising, is the response of the Democrats to charges that the decision to grant Solyndra a $500mm loan guarantee was motivated by Solyndra’s being controlled by George Kaiser Family Foundation, whose eponymous sponsor is a second generation oil man, a first generation banker, and a big time financial backer of President Obama’s excursions of self-aggrandizement. A memo drafted by Democratic congressional staffers and sent to Democratic members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is investigating Solyndra, states that newly released e-mails expressing concern in the Obama Administration about Solyndra’s viability and the ramifications of a Solyndra bankruptcy for (of course, the major concern for any pol) President Obama’s re-election chances

“…do not contain evidence that government decisions relating to Solyndra were influenced by considerations relating to campaign donations.”

You don’t say! No one actually wrote down that the Solyndra guarantee had to go through as a favor to a hefty contributor! What a surprise!

Surely if the guarantee to Solyndra were a political favor to George Kaiser, no one, certainly no one in a White House run by, at the time, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, would be foolish enough to write that down anywhere. Such a deal would be done with winks, nods, and, if need be, very circumspect conversations of which no records were kept.

The Democratic defense to the Solyndra cesspool, i.e., that there is no e-mail evidence that Solyndra was a political gift to George Kaiser, is surely one of the most fatuous, or the most disingenuous (Yours truly suspects the latter.), defenses ever attempted of a political fiasco.