The White House Car Czar

Cold-sweat talks, high-stakes power plays and four-letter outbursts: In the room with Obama's team as it tries to save Detroit.

By STEVEN RATTNER

The week after his 2008 election, in Chicago, at President Barack Obama's first substantive sit-down with his economic advisers, it was conceded that no situation on the economic front appeared thornier than the one I had been recruited to manage.

Mr. Obama had asked, "Is there any way these guys are going to avoid bankruptcy?"

"Unlikely," he was told.

"Why can't they make a Corolla?"

"We wish we knew," replied his advisers.

***

There was very little time. The $17 billion in TARP funds provided by the Bush administration was draining away fast. Doubts were widespread that the auto makers, required to submit "viability plans" on Feb. 17, would make a sound case for more help.

I was recruited as the New Year began. As I hurried through the mid-January chill to Obama transition headquarters, Secret Service agents stood guard near X-ray machines and scanners behind bulletproof glass. Upstairs, in a corner of the eighth floor, the president-elect's economic team was crammed into a half-dozen rooms. Tim Geithner [soon to be Treasury secretary] and Larry Summers [soon to head the National Economic Council] had offices the size of those of vice presidents at my old firm, with their names printed out on 8½-by-11 paper and taped to their doors. Mr. Obama himself occupied a space a short hallway—and a few more Secret Service agents—away.

Messy piles of paper and a mountain of leftover coffee cups testified to the transition team's long hours, but the mood was not despairing. Although the situation Mr. Obama had inherited was frightening, his victory represented a mandate for change, and change the incoming administration was determined to effect. Fixing the problems that threatened to add the Detroit auto makers to the junk heap of old American dreams was very much on its to-do list. In this crisis atmosphere, the normal pomp of government was, at least at this informal moment, a quaint notion: Incoming cabinet secretaries labored side by side with interns. Meetings gathered spontaneously in cramped corners. Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's chief of staff, strode the halls like a military commander.

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