I'll agree that he dragged his feet for the right moment on gay marriage but the auto bailout could have SO easily gone the wrong way and Obama would be married to it. As in, he's catching the blame for decades of business decisions, in exchange for trying to help. But he did.
Are we sure the auto bailout hasn't gone the wrong way? The problem with bailouts are two-fold:
1. They protect jobs, but often at a much higher cost than is justified. Admittedly, I don't know the numbers here, but I recall something about the ban on foreign tires protecting US jobs at a cost of $900,000 per job saved.
2. They introduce moral hazard. See our repeated pattern of bank bailouts for examples. If the auto bailout did cause this problem, we won't know about it until much later.
A defining feature of capitalism is competition, which means economic winners and losers. If we protect companies from the need to restructure, even for a noble purpose, we may cause more problems down the road. The auto industry wouldn't have ceased to exist if two companies had gone through bankruptcy. Other automakers and manufacturers would have bought those assets and run them more efficiently. And those other companies are exactly the type you want to be doing this, since they didn't need a bailout in the first place, right?
That's a longer term than political success/failure and a different conversation.
I don't think the moral hazard argument holds for the auto industry like it does for banks, and the auto industry is strategically critical to have around and in good health. But there are valid arguments that disagree.
