Democrats congratulated themselves more than 150 times for President Barack Obama’s 2009 auto bailout during last week’s Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, N.C., an analysis conducted by conservative organization Let Freedom Ring shows.
Obama praised himself for the bailout three times during his Thursday speech, the Let Freedom Ring analysis found. “I’ve met workers in Detroit and Toledo who feared they’d never build another American car,” Obama said, for instance, according to a transcript the White House released after the speech. “And today, they can’t build them fast enough, because we reinvented a dying auto industry that’s back on the top of the world.”
The group found that Vice President Joe Biden went further than Obama and touted the bailout five times in his speech. That includes how Biden said that because of Obama, “we can now proudly say what you’ve heard me say the last six months: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.”
Former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm easily wins, though, when it comes to who at the DNC touted the bailout the most. Granholm — whose energetic speech was described by some as her “Howard Dean moment,” a reference to the former Democratic National Committee chairman’s scream in the dying days of his 2004 presidential bid — heaped praise on convention crowd 24 times, according to Let Freedom Ring.
Missing completely from their praise of Obama’s 2009 auto bailouts, though, was any reference to the 20,000 non-union Delphi salaried retirees whose pensions were terminated in the deal. Let Freedom Ring Executive Director Alex Cortes told The Daily Caller that the omission is startling — and a sign that the bailout wasn’t likely as wonderful as Democrats would like the American people to believe.
“At the Democratic Convention, the auto bailout and its supposed greatness were mentioned over 150 times,” Cortes said. “But not once did the Democrats mention the victims of the auto bailout: The non-union workers at GM’s primary parts supplier Delphi who had their pensions terminated by the Obama Administration at the very same time the pensions of their union colleagues were bailed out with taxpayer money.”
Cortes’ organization is running ads to draw attention to the Delphi salaried retirees who lost their retirements as a result of the auto bailout.
“Because the Democrats won’t tell this full truth about the auto bailout and its victims, we will,” Cortes said. “Our $7 million advertising campaign empowers the Obama administration’s handpicked losers to speak directly on camera about how our President unfairly harmed them.”