One conspiracy theory that flashed past my consciousness was that Chrysler dealers shut down in the Chrysler bankruptcy were disproportionately Republican – cue ominous music and blame the Obama administration.
Nate Silver crashes the party by doing some research, crunching some numbers, and finding that car dealers tend to contribute to Republicans over Democrats by a huge margin.
Overall, 88 percent of the contributions from car dealers went to Republican candidates and just 12 percent to Democratic candidates. By comparison, the list of dealers on Doug Ross’s list (which I haven’t vetted, but I assume is fine) gave 92 percent of their money to Republicans — not really a significant difference.
There’s no conspiracy here, folks — just some bad math.
The real story is that the White House is closing auto dealerships, regardless of who they contributed to. I don’t trust any Administration to know how to make a proper business decision, but especially one that thinks borrow and spend is good policy.
To Mike’s point: Olbermann was just on TV pointing out that the GOP and its lackeys were collectively against any kind of auto bailout last fall, and were more than willing to let all of the dealers close.