Meet Brian Deese

Tuesday, June 02, 2009
By Glenn Beck

Here's the one thing and there's absolutely nothing funny about it: the wunderkind in charge of saving our auto industry is a 31-year-old with about as much experience as a summer intern.

Despite having no formal business education, no business experience and no auto industry experience, 31-year-old Brian Deese is now in charge of dismantling General Motors.

So what does this guy's resume look like? It should be impressive, considering he's managing America's $458,000 per day involuntary investment.

Deese grew up in a Boston suburb, the son of a political science professor at Boston College. He moved to Vermont and attended Middlebury College, where he studied political science and also took time to host a campus radio show called "Bedknobs and Beatniks," described in one write-up as "a format of music, news, discussion and banter."

He graduated college in 2000 and then it was onto a pair of non-profit think tanks: the Center for Global Development and the Center for American Progress.

Eventually Deese went to Yale for a law degree, but a few credits short of graduating, he went "on leave" to work on Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, quickly becoming her top economic policy staffer.

Last summer, Deese moved to the Obama campaign as a deputy economic policy director and, just before this current gig, he served on Obama's transition team as an economic adviser.

He was apparently the only full-time member of the auto task force from election night until about Valentine's Day, which Deese says was, "a little scary."

What should be more than a little scary for GM, much less the American people, is that however smart Deese may be, he has literally no private sector experience; he is not formally trained in economics or business; and, according to The Times, he "never spent much time flipping through the endless studies about the nature of the American and Japanese auto industries."

In fact, until a few months ago, the closest Deese came to an automobile plant, was sleeping in a GM parking lot, where Pontiac G5s have been made since the plant's 1960s heyday.

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By the way, thanks to Deese's plan, there won't be a Pontiac anymore.

So, this is what one of those "uniquely qualified" geniuses handpicked by President Obama look like.

Feeling good about your investment, America?

With only one out of five Americans supporting the auto bailout in the first place; I wonder what kind of support there is for the inexperienced Brian Deese to tinker with the auto industry and change capitalism? I'm not an economist, but, like Deese, I am "on leave" from Yale. So I guess that makes me "uniquely qualified" to take a guess at the number: zero.

Which, ironically, is just a hair less than what GM's stock is now worth.

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