Book Review - Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry

Margaret Carlson

Rahm "F" Bomb

No one thought it was the Waltons working at the White House. Yet one scene in the new book by Steven Rattner, former automotive adviser to President Barack Obama, still comes as a shock. The F-word is an epithet White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel uses a hundred times a day, but it is extremely indiscreet to hurl it at the United Auto Workers, a sacred cow among the Democratic deities. That’s the one juicy revelation in Rattner’s “Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry” that the White House is especially anxious to tamp down. UAW President Bob King has already sent out an e-mail calling the account “baloney.” Of course, he wasn’t there. While there have been other books about the Obama administration, this is the first from the inside and it is full of glimpses behind the curtain that we usually have to wait four years to see. The president is as smart as any chief executive officer he has encountered, writes Rattner, co-founder of private-equity firm Quadrangle Group LLC. He is conversant on the whole range of auto-industry issues, right down to the liquidity of the supply chain, but he has his blind spots. Read more here:

Book Review - Overhaul: An Insider's Account of the Obama Administration's Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry