Democrats and Republicans are debating that question today, but we may not know the answer for 10 or 15 years.
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By Doron Levin
FORTUNE -- In the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, Democrats are using the slogan "Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive" to defend the record of President Barack Obama.
Republicans can't easily deny bin Laden's demise at the hands of U.S. Navy Seals on President Obama's watch. But the opposition is eager to make an issue of the government's managed bankruptcy of GM in June, 2009. The GOP's rebuttal of Democratic bragging about the biggest domestic automaker depends in part on just how "alive" GM is.
Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has argued that the government's management of an accelerated 30-day bankruptcy process should have been a conventional bankruptcy instead, implying that a stronger GM (GM) might have emerged. The government's blueprint included firing the CEO, elimination of hundreds of dealers and the discontinuation of GM brands like Hummer and Saturn.
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Critically, the team installed by Washington also decided to save rather than sell GM's troubled European operations. Losses at GM Europe and an inability to fix operations on the continent are ballooning into GM's No. 1 headache and a principal reason why the automaker's profitability is subpar, according to CEO Dan Akerson.
Jeremy Anwyl, vice chairman of the Edmunds.com automotive website, credited the government for rescuing GM from insolvency. "But the real question is whether (GM) will be successful in 10 or 15 years. Here the answer is much cloudier," he wrote Tuesday in a report analyzing August vehicle sales. And he asked a question that sounded rhetorical: "Has GM's culture really changed?"
GM's stock came out at $33 a share in an initial public offering in November, 2010. Since then it has dropped about a third, selling in the low 20s. The S&P 500, meanwhile,
http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/05/general-motors-election/?iid=HP_LN
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