It should also be noted -- redux
Hates Idiots,
A couple of points. The Bush Administration didn't outright reject Solyndra's loan guarantee. A DOE credit review committee remanded the loan back to the agency without prejudice because it wasn???t ready for conditional commitment (this according to the DOE). Two months later, the same committee approved the loan once Solyndra improved its application.
Of course, it's impossible to know whether the Bush administration would have ultimately awarded the loan guarantee. Maybe there would have been a last-minute decision to reject it. However, Walter Streight Howes, a director in the Department of Energy under President George W. Bush, told Platts in an interview last week that he would have approved the loan as well and that he saw Solyndra as "a good gamble."
Howe's stance today seems to indicate that Solyndra would've received the loan guarantee regardless of whether Bush or Obama had been in office.
To be clear, there were a number of Obama administration-specific failures with this loan guarantee, especially the management of it in the months after the original award was approved.
