Way to go, General Motors! You’ve staked your survival on electric cars, hybrid cars, and high-mileage cars - apparently reading tea leaves and thinking that was what Obama and Congressional Democrats wanted. Instead, it turns out Barack Obama thinks you did it all wrong. Even more surprising, it’s GM’s high-tech, environmentally-friendly, crown jewel car of the future that was your biggest mistake.

The Chevrolet Volt may wow the media when it arrives in dealerships next year, but the Obama administration believes the plug-in electric car will cost too much and won’t attract enough buyers.

“While the Volt holds promise, it will likely be too expensive to be commercially successful in the short-term,” the administration said in its evaluation of General Motors Corp.’s restructuring plan. The car “is currently projected to be much more expensive than its gasoline-fueled peers and will likely need substantial reductions in manufacturing cost in order to become commercially viable.”

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama administration is prepared to recommend billions in new ‘loans’ to America’s automakers, as long as they meet certain requirements. But once you get past that headline, something very disturbing becomes apparent: Obama’s task force never really considered a bailout on the merits, but concerned itself only with how to structure it. The decision to pour tens of billions more into Chrysler and GM was apparently made before the team was ever named.

Interviews with task-force members indicate that the administration doesn’t want to let General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC slip into bankruptcy protection, a course advocated by some critics of the industry. Instead, the task force is expected to say that it sees viable futures for both GM and Chrysler, but only if there are sacrifices from their managements, unions and GM’s bondholders. The team will also lay out a firm timeline for action.

The government is prepared to lend the companies more money. The two companies have requested $22 billion more — including $9 billion for the second quarter. But the task force may not disburse new aid immediately, choosing instead to preserve that as leverage…

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We at Red State have pointed out several times that while Chris Dodd agreed to insert an amendment into the stimulus bill to protect AIG bonuses, he was not in position to do so. Chris Dodd was not a Member of the conference committee that drafted the final version of the bill - the only one that had protection for AIG. The Democrats on the conference committee locked the Republicans out of the process and wrote the bill themselves. No Republican supported the conference report; no Republican signed it (look on the final page of the conference report here).

The Democrat conferees were Daniel Inouye, Max Baucus, Harry Reid, Dave Obey, Charlie Rangel, and Henry Waxman. One (or more) of them allowed Dodd to make the change.

So who was it?

Harry Reid needs to talk about his role in this. And so should Daniel Inouye, Max Baucus, Dave Obey, Charlie Rangel, and Henry Waxman. Each was responsible for the contents of the bill that the six of them drafted together.

When the House passed the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan - and the carveout for AIG bonuses - Democrats allowed a scant few hours for review of the 1,000 page bill before the vote. Some honest Members of Congress admitted they had not read the bill. Nevada’s Dina Titus however, claimed to have done so:

House Democrats voted on the ’stimulus’ bill just a few hours after they drafted the text (without input from Republicans). Did Representative Titus really go over the entire text as she claimed, or was she simply too embarrassed to acknowledge that she was voting on something she hadn’t read? In either case, she clearly felt she knew enough to vote for the bill, since the House had been talking about it ‘for a long time’ - about 3 or 4 weeks, actually.

Did Titus really know what she was voting on, or was she shirking the first and most basic part of her job? It’s time for all the Democrats who voted for this bill to answer that question.

Today Treasury Secretary Geithner gave an interview to CNN in an attempt to head off further inquiries into the Democrats’ handling of the AIG mess. What he admits is stunning:

Velshi: One of the issues CNN and other news organizations have reported since late January, that AIG was going to pay about $450 million to about 400 employees of the AIG financial productions unit, which is really at the heart of AIG’s problems, an otherwise healthy company.

There is some dispute as to who knew when what. AIG’s CEO said that you might have known about this earlier than you did. When did you learn about this, and what did you learn?

Geithner: I was informed by my staff of the full scale of these specific things on Tuesday, March 10th. And as soon as I heard about the full scale of these things, we moved very actively to explore every possible avenue — legal avenue — to address this problem, to make sure that, again, the assistance we were providing was not going to unduly benefit these people.

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I don’t think that Jim DeMint necessarily has Barack Obama’s political fortunes in mind when he advises him to fire Tim Geithner, but it’s good advice anyway.

In Washington D.C., it’s not hard to predict what usually happens to a politician in Geithner’s place. Several Republicans have called for him to resign; more will. The press will begin to ask many Democrats what they think. Several of them are clearly not far from calling for a resignation as well; one will before long. That will be the signal that Geithner is near the end of the road.

Obama still has a very ambitious agenda that depends on his Treasury Secretary. There’s health care reform, the budget, cap-and-trade, a resolution for GM and Chrysler, and more efforts to stabilize banks. Administration officials are still saying that Congress is likely to need to approve more money for that bailout. That ship has probably already sailed, but at the very least it’s impossible to imagine Geithner getting it approved. The sooner Obama cuts his losses, the better.