Say Anything Blog

An important update to what has now been dubbed “dealergate” that’s very worth your time to read, including this part:

This puzzled us. Why would there be a significant and highly positive correlation between dealer survival and Clinton donors? Granted, that P-Value (0.125) isn’t enough to reject the null hypothesis at 95% confidence intervals (our null hypothesis being that the effect is due to random chance), but a 12.5% chance of a Type I error in rejecting a null hypothesis (false rejection of a true hypothesis) is at least eyebrow raising. Most statistians would not call this a “find” as 95% confidence intervals are the gold standard for this sort of work. Nevertheless, it seems clear that something is going on here. Specifically, the somewhat low probability that the Clinton data showing higher survivability of Clinton donors could result just from pure chance. But why not better significance with any of the other variables? Why this stand out?
Then we got to thinking. Steven Rattner, the Car Czar, is married to Maureen White, one-time national finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. What does Maureen do now? From her website:

Maureen White is currently Chairman of the Board of Overseers of The International Rescue Committee (IRC), a member of the North American Advisory Board for the London School of Economics, and a National Finance Chair of the Hillary Clinton for President Campaign. (emphasis ours)

That website looks dated, but you get the idea.

Again, we want to point out that our findings are preliminary and subject to change. But whatever the result, the Administration has made themselves very vulnerable by taking charge of the dealership closing decisions.

Indeed, as Doug Ross (who broke this story) notes: “It is incumbent that “Car Czar” Rattner and the Obama administration immediately disclose — with their vaunted ifull transparency’ — the methods used to select dealerships for closure.”

I don’t think there’s anything that’s been exposed to date that would lead any reasonable person to conclude that the car dealerships weren’t closed based on the political leanings of their owners, but certainly there’s nothing wrong with Obama being fully transparent about the selection process.  After all, this is the first time in the history of the country that a Presidential administration has ordered thousands of privately-owned businesses closed.  If the President is going to take that sort of power upon himself (the President should never have that kind of power, but I digress) he should at the very least be 100% transparent in his exercise of it.

Given Obama’s promises about transparency and accountability on the campaign trail you wouldn’t think that’d be a problem.

But we’ll just have to wait and see, I guess.