Boy, Mack McLarty is a Lucky Guy

All of his dealerships -- six of 'em -- remain open, while his local (Republican-donating) competition is wiped out.

Director Blue screws up the math, here, I think, in calculating the odds for this happening randomly. He multiplies the odds of any McLarty-owned dealership remaining open (.75) by the odds of McLarty's competitors being shuttered (.25 each time).

I don't think that's right, because these aren't independent probabilities. They're linked. Once you decide to keep one dealership open, the odds increase dramatically that you'll close down nearby shops. That's sort of the point of closing dealerships in the first place. If you're closing down shops at all, it's to reduce how much business they're cannibalizing from each other.

However, it is very odd that all six of McLarty's dealerships managed to make the cut, isn't it? Odds of that: Less than 18%. (.75 multiplied by itself six times.)

Taranto explains why these closings come now-- state law requires just cause for terminating a dealership franchise contract, but when the franchisor is in bankruptcy, that trumps state law and allows the franchisor to void contracts without worrying about state law or just cause.

As many point out, it doesn't really matter that most dealers could be expected to be Republican; what is critical is that virtually none of the minority of Obama-donors are being shuttered.

Yes, if a majority of the dealers are Republican-leaning, we could expect a majority of the closed dealerships to be owned by Republican-leaners. A majority of them. But we wouldn't expect virtually all of them to be.

Since most people in the US are white, one would imagine that most jobs at a company would be filled by whites. But if all of a company's jobs were filled by whites -- well, for some reason I think liberals like Nate Silver (pushing this "well most of them are Republican anyway" analysis) would get a bit suspicious that there are hidden, impermissibe factors at work.

It doesn't help that Chrysler is keeping its criteria secret. Or that many of the closed Republican dealerships would be expected to remain open according to any criteria, except for the partisan one:

Now, and this is important, Chrysler claimed that its formula for determining whether a dealership should close or not included "sales volume, customer service scores, local market share and average household income in the immediate area."

Dealer Jim Anderer told Fox News' Neil Cavuto he can't comprehend how his dealership can be among those killed: he stated that his sales volume ranking is in the top 2 percent of all dealers.

Furthermore, Anderer says explanations aren't forthcoming. "They won't tell us. They seem to be running for cover right now because they won't give us a solid explanation. They come up with all these reasons, but none of them seem to make sense... This is insanity. The government is stealing my business. And they're telling me there's nothing I can do about it... There was no process that you could put your finger on and say, 'Hey, we cut 25 percent of the lowest performing dealers.' They didn't do that. Nobody will give us a real clear explanation of the formula that they came up with."

Release the "formula," guys.

You think Mack McLarty doesn't know how to get the number of the people making these decisions or drop a mention of his importance in Democratic politics? I sorta think he knows how.

Thanks to Slublog.

posted by Ace at 02:16 PM

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