Overhaul by Steven Rattner

accountable—they would get no long-term money from the government without showing they could survive as going concerns. Importantly, from the Bush team's perspective, the incoming administration would publicly embrace that same commitment at the time of the viability adviser's appointment.
    Paulson responded warmly to the idea. Bailing out an industry so fundamental to the American identity and way of life was a politically charged subject. Only someone outside the usual chains of command, someone of authority and integrity—Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman, was mentioned—could force the tough decisions the industry would need. What was more, if the White House could persuade the Democrats to agree on the choice of an adviser now, there would be someone securely in place to hold off the unions and keep the bailout in check after Bush left office. "Financial viability adviser" quickly got shortened to "car czar," an epithet that would come to cause me much grief.
    Paulson and Summers went round repeatedly that week about TARP. Summers felt that Paulson hadn't truly sold the Bush White House on the importance of taking down the second half of TARP and was trying to enlist the Obama team in his cause instead. In the course of every conversation with Paulson, Summers brought up autos. Although skeptical about the car-czar idea, he had started thinking about possible recruits, hence the call to me the afternoon before Thanksgiving.
    Over the holiday, the White House stepped up its effort to engage Obama in a joint approach on both TARP and autos. Bolten phoned Emanuel to ask for a face-to-face meeting, but Rahm was reluctant. In the last presidential transition occurring during a historic economic crisis—Franklin Roosevelt's succeeding Herbert Hoover in 1933—FDR had deliberately remained aloof until he was in office. The Obama team doubted that there was a workable way to co-govern. And it had studied that precedent and concluded that it had little to gain politically by collaborating on any issue, let alone TARP and autos. This carefully calculated decision was packaged under the appealing sound bite "there can be only one President at a time."
    This was a source of frustration to Bush officials, who were pleased when Emanuel, unwilling to reject Bolten out of hand, agreed to a meeting—although he did not want it to take place in the Bush White House and specified that Summers, not he, would lead the Obama delegation. On Sunday afternoon, November 30, the two sides, mostly dressed in khakis and sports coats, gathered at the Treasury Department in Paulson's corner office, Paulson in his customary wing chair and Summers on the couch next to him. The Bush delegation, led by Bolten, Paulson, Gutierrez, Kaplan, chief congressional liaison Dan Meyer, and Keith Hennessey (whom Summers would be replacing), far outranked the team from Obama, which was still forming a staff. Paulson laid out the White House proposal: if the incoming administration would "link arms" to win approval for the second $350 billion of TARP, then the outgoing administration would support an auto rescue plan. Following this, Kaplan outlined his proposal for including an auto rescue in the uses of the second tranche of TARP. President Bush would issue an executive order appointing a financial viability adviser to administer the bailout, and the new Treasury secretary would agree to make TARP funding available only if the automakers could show that they were viable. As Summers already knew, this adviser would have broad authority to require financial plans from the automakers and to impose his own measures—including Chapter 11 bankruptcies—if the companies fell short. While the adviser would be officially selected by Bush, the Republicans made it clear that only someone acceptable to the Obama team would be named.
    Summers zoomed in on TARP, probing for evidence that the added money was actually needed before