7The Wall Street Journal weighs in on U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R–Janesville) and his daring to repeat what 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama said:

How dare he so much as mention the Wisconsin assembly plant that President Obama promised to keep open but didn’t?

The claim is that there was nothing the White House could do, because the General Motors facility in Mr. Ryan’s hometown of Janesville was already starting to idle production and slated for closure when Mr. Obama took office. Therefore the empty production lines are George W. Bush’s fault, like everything else in the last four years.

But so what? Mr. Ryan made the factual statement that “we were about to lose a major factory” (our emphasis). Basic comprehension of human language didn’t deter Obama campaign functionary Stephanie Cutter from claiming on MSNBC Thursday that “There’s no delicate way to put this, but he lied. He blatantly lied—and brazenly.”

Coming from a specialist in the form, perhaps that was meant as a compliment, but then again all this is an enormous exercise in missing the point. Mr. Ryan wasn’t saying Mr. Obama should have saved this particular plant, as if it were akin to the sea levels that he promised to command in his inaugural address. Mr. Ryan was mocking the President who promised on the record and apparently believed he could save the plant.

At a campaign event at the Janesville factory in 2008 on “a clean energy economy,” Mr. Obama praised its workers for “how many hybrids and fuel-efficient vehicles you’re churning out.” He added: “And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to retool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

In October of the same year, when Mr. Obama paid another visit, he promised that “As president, I will lead an effort to retool plants like the GM facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

In other words, this is another familiar Obama adventure in industrial policy: The government will tell auto makers what kind of cars they should manufacture, even if they’re not the kind of cars consumers want to buy. For the record, all that talk of “retooling” is because the Janesville plant used to make the trucks and SUVs that are being driven from the market in part by $4 gasoline and rising fuel-efficiency standards.

Several additional points come to mind. The aforementioned trucks and SUVs were some of GM’s actually profitable products. GM has been unable to make profitable small cars for decades, whether they tried to build them itself (does the Chevrolet Citation ring a bell?) or import them from one of its subsidiaries (anything with an “Isuzu” or “Geo” label on it), and even the late joint venture with Toyota that produced the last Nova. The federal government has been spending more than a decade legislating popular cars out of existence (for instance, the large station wagon), and there is no question the Obama administration is doing the same thing right now with its 54.5-mpg standard, which will kill everything smaller than a Chevy Spark, including pickup trucks and SUVs.

What happened to GM’s Janesville plant demonstrates that Wisconsin got no benefit at all from the GM and Chrysler bailouts. To assert that GM or Chrysler would have gone out of business without the bailout ignores the fact that companies have reorganized under federal bankruptcy laws for decades (for instance, seemingly every major airline) and stayed in business. To say that not bailing out GM or Chrysler would have hurt auto industry suppliers (for instance, Johnson Controls) ignores the fact that the American auto industry is far bigger than GM or Chrysler, including not just Ford but six Japanese manufacturers, three German manufacturers, and South Korea’s Hyundai.

The bailout was primarily for the benefit of the United Auto Workers, certainly not for GM’s bondholders or its white-collar employees. (Interesting additional fact: None of the Japanese, German or Korean carmakers have UAW-member workers in this country.) Of course, none of the Janesville UAW workers benefited either.