What a complete -- and unnecessary -- disgrace the Obama administration's performance in the Solyndra affair has been.
Admittedly, not all the facts are out about the administration's decision to award a $535 million dollar federal loan guarantee to the recently collapsed California-based solar panel maker. And admittedly, many free-market extremist politicians and think tank hacks are only too happy to blur a critical distinction: between criminal or otherwise corrupt activities (or simple incompetence, for that matter) on the one hand, and the inherent difficulties and risks on the other hand of subsidizing new, potentially game-changing, but by definition chancy products and technologies that will struggle to attract private capital from the short-term focused American financial system.
But notwithstanding an FBI investigation, even the possibility of criminal fraud by the company's owners wouldn't represent the most powerful and most important indictment of the president and his aides on this score. Instead, their worst failing has already been exposed -- an unforgivably sloppy, tone-deaf, politics-as-usual approach to the kinds of industrial and technology policy initiatives that could be crucial to the nation’s recovery and longer-term economic future.
After all, any government involvement in promoting economic activity on the industry level is already controversial enough in America. And the White House's conservative adversaries clearly have been loaded for bear on this issue ever since the Wall Street and auto industry bailouts. As a result, the need to keep the process completely above reproach should have been screamingly obvious to the president, all his political appointees (including his Secretary of Energy), every bureaucrat involved, and every member of Congress claiming to take seriously the idea that government has a useful economic role to play beyond getting the macro fundamentals right and promoting basic research.
Every lobbyist and financial supporter of the president, no matter how influential or helpful, should have experienced an immediate telephone hang-up or door-slamming every time they tried to contact a responsible official regarding loan guarantees such as Solyndra's or similar programs. And every White House staffer should have been under strict, blunt orders -- from the top -- to do nothing even suggesting the appearance of exploiting these initiatives for partisan political gain, or of playing political favorites.
Instead, what happened? The Bush administration, which originated the clean energy loan program, had expressed major qualms about Solyndra's entire business and technology plan during its final weeks in office. These reservations, moreover, persisted after Inauguration Day among career bureaucrats at the Energy Department and the White House Office of Management and Budget. Yet Solyndra's loan guarantee application progressed through the Obama vetting process, anyway. In mid-2009, it wound up receiving the very first and biggest of four such loan guarantees handed out by the Energy Department.
Partly responsible for Solyndra's success was a major Obama push to speed all stimulus spending out the door at the depths of the economic and financial crisis. Nonetheless, during this period, top White House aides also met several times with billionaire Obama fund-raiser George Kaiser -- a major indirect Solyndra investor. And released emails along with recent public statements make clear that administration political appointees were hounding the doubters in the lower ranks to get with the program pronto.
In addition, at the time, Solyndra was also spending nearly $2 million on lobbying, according to The New York Times, hiring "six firms with ties to members of Congress [including then Speaker and now House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi] and officials of the Obama White House." One of these lobbyists' prime -- and secured -- targets was senior White House official Valerie B. Jarrett, a long-time confidante of President Obama.
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