It’s baaaack! The electric car is charging its way onto the freeways and Chris Paine, our guest tonight, documents the vehicle’s resurrection by GM (who killed off the EV1), Nissan and Tesla along with Reverend Gadget aka Greg Abbott’s retro-fitted electric cars which use the bodies of Boxters and other sports cars to house rechargeable batteries. In Revenge of the Electric Car, Paine takes us through the death of the EV1 to the return of the electric car, spurred as much by public demand as by rising gas costs, corporate rivalry, and in some cases the creators’ desire to redeem themselves or to be heroes.

The successful auto industry rescue is definitely a feather in the cap for the Administration, protecting up to a million direct and indirect auto industry jobs, and putting GM and Chrysler in a position to succeed. Now there’s a new contract with the United Auto Workers to share the success with labor.

One criticism of the rescue was that the UAW was forced to give up good wages for new employees and accept a two-tier structure for pay and benefits. But unless I have my timeline wrong, that all happened in a contract prior to the decision to forward additional loans to automakers in 2009. That contract expired, and the UAW just inked a new deal with GM that should serve as an industry standard. And they made some significant gains in this contract, a testament to how far back the industry has come.

The DNC is focused on the GM and Chrysler headlines, not so much the suppliers, where the bulk of the jobs are. More importantly, the Democrats as a whole don’t seem to be cataloging the many examples where down-ticket Republicans are claiming credit for government investments in new technology that are just now paying off in jobs.

The Obama Administration was gung ho to brag about the GM IPO last year. But if I’m not mistaken, this is the first time the White House has bragged nationally about jobs created thanks to the auto bailout.

For the moment it looks like just three things have worked to create jobs: the MIC, QE2 and other policies favoring commodities, and actual industrial policy.

If only non-prescription Oxy had a tax deduction.

Remember when wingnuts were calling for a boycott of GM?

When Steven Rattner published this piece on the GM IPO in HuffPo, he had not yet been sued by NY’s Attorney General for allegedly being “willing to do whatever it took to get his hands on pension fund money including paying kickbacks, orchestrating a movie deal, and funneling campaign contributions,” nor had he yet settled–with no admission of guilt–the SEC investigation that alleges he, “delivered special favors and conducted sham transactions that corrupted the Retirement Fund’s investment process.” Thus, it would go too far to call the Steven Rattner that published that piece a fraudster, or even an alleged fraudster.

But a big part of this victory lap is fraudulent.

This IPO is no great reflection, one way or another, on the success of the bailout.

Indeed, it may be something far worse. . . .

I come to Steven Rattner’s Overhaul: An Insider’s Account of the Obama Administration’s Emergency Rescue of the Auto Industry from a very particular perspective. As a Michigander whose husband still works in the auto industry and whose town has benefited from battery subsidies, I’m a grateful direct beneficiary of the work the Obama Administration did to save the auto industry. But that also means I read this book, which might have been subtitled, “Wall Street gapes at Detroit” from the perspective, “Detroit gapes back at Wall Street.”