The Weirdest Conspiracy Theory of All Time: Republican Chrysler Dealers Targeted by Obama?

Posted by Matt Taibbi, True/Slant at 10:00 AM on June 1, 2009.

We ran binary logistic regressions across the variables. The results are interesting but the most dramatic was saved dealers v. donations by candidate and/or party.

This puzzled us. Why would there be an significant noticeable (we have rightly been called out for using significant here) 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?

via Zero Hedge: I Am Marla’s Observations On Artificial Selection In Chrysler Dealerships.

I thought this was a joke when I first heard of it, but apparently it’s circulating as a serious theory, and gaining momentum.

It seems that there has been a lot of grumbling surrounding the closure of certain car dealerships in the the Chrysler wind-down. The company didn’t want to shut down some 25% of its dealerships, but the President’s Automotive Task Force insisted. And once the shutdowns commenced, rumors began to circulate that there were more forced closures of dealerships who contributed heavily to Republican candidates last year than dealerships who gave to Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Picking up on this, Zero Hedge — the very interesting site that gave us lots of very intriguing data on Goldman Sachs in recent months, even prompting a response from the company — put out an analysis of the closures and found a very strong correlation between dealerships that were saved, and dealerships that donated heavily to Hillary Clinton last year. Why should that matter? Because Obama’s guy in the Auto Task Force is Steven Rattner, hedge fund star, big pal to Times owner Pinch Sulzberger, former bigwig at Lazard Freres, and former journalist himself. And Rattner is married to Maureen White, who was once Hillary’s National Finance Chairman. So the theory here is that White and Rattner got together and made a Santa-Claus style list of “good” dealers and “bad” dealers.

I don’t know. It sounds sort of like bullshit to me. The notion that someone would bother to kneecap a bunch of Chysler dealers seems pretty absurd. Hell, if you want to punish a Chrysler dealer, it seems to me that the best thing to do is force him to keep trying to sell Chryslers. But you can expect to hear some more about this in the future… I’ve seen this three times already, now all that needs to happen is a Tweet on the subject from Kim Kardashian or something. Stay tuned.

Tagged as: obama, conservatives, conspiracy theory, wing nuts, car dealerships