Obamateurism of the Day

Was there something in the air yesterday? Potential OOTDs fell into my lap all day long, but let’s go after one that went mainly under the radar. It seems that Barack Obama takes the sobriquet “Government Motors” a little too seriously, as he explained that the marketing plan that automakers use is all wrong:

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The country’s automakers should ditch their focus on SUVs and trucks in favor of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, President Obama said Monday.

“You can’t just make money on SUVs and trucks,” Obama said during a town hall forum in Cannon Falls, Minn. “There is a place for SUVs and trucks, but as gas prices keep on going up, you have got to understand the market. People are going to try to save money.”

Kind of like the Chevy Volt, huh? Yeah, if they want to make the big money, automakers need to put all of their effort into, er

The July sales numbers are out and the Chevy Volt continues to electrify (get it?) the country. GM sold … 125 Volts last month!

Way back in March I made fun of the Volt for selling 281 units in February. Turns out, February was a goodmonth. But wait, there’s more! GM says they’re going toincrease production to 5,000 Volts per month in order to keep up with demand. You see, they claim that the reason the Volt isn’t selling is that they can’t keep enough cars on the lot. A GM spokeswoman recently claimed that they are “virtually sold out.” Which is virtually true. Mark Modica called around his local Chevy dealers and found plenty of Volts waiting for an environmentally conscious driver to bring them home.

You know, we used to have a country where companies manufactured products, consumers made their choices, and government just collected the taxes on the transactions.  If companies got it wrong, they went out of business and others bought the assets and made better decisions.  Now we have a government that wants to tell manufacturers what to make, tell consumers what to buy, and collect a whole lot more taxes so that they can bail out companies and run other industries into the ground.  And that’s bad enough, but Obama’s marketing plans have all of the success of his economic plans, and baby, that ain’t good at all.

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How about this, Mr. President: you work on making government efficient, and leave the consumer decisions to the consumers?

Got an Obamateurism of the Day? If you see a foul-up by Barack Obama, e-mail it to me at [email protected] with the quote and the link to the Obamateurism. I’ll post the best Obamateurisms on a daily basis, depending on how many I receive. Include a link to your blog, and I’ll give some link love as well. And unlike Slate, I promise to end the feature when Barack Obama leaves office.

Illustrations by Chris Muir of Day by Day. Be sure to read the adventures of Sam, Zed, Damon, and Jan every day!

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