Finally!

With his dramatic decision to oust General Motors chairman Rick Wagoner, President Obama has created the possibility that the company will end its interminable death spiral and emerge from this mess as a viable entity.

And in a move that can only be compared to President Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers in the first months of his presidency, Obama has demonstrated to the world that he is a bold and decisive leader.

I don't know about you, but Wagoner's ousting sure got my attention. He was the face of Detroit and represented all that was wrong with a company that has long lost the admiration and affection of most Americans.

Lost is the operative word here. GM was once the largest, most profitable and most admired company in the world. But along with Chrysler and Ford, it lost its nerve in the 1970s as the Asian imports made their inroads into the American market.

Business school bean counters took over where once salesmen and engineers had ruled. Wagoner was a classic example: A Harvard Business School grad and company-man with no vision; a manager, not a leader; incremental, not bold.

(Example: Here's Mark LaNeve, GM's vice president for North American sales and marketing, commenting Tuesday on the company's program to cover car payments for workers who lose their jobs: "We think it has a very high perceived value." Most inspiring! No surprise the man has a degree in 'business communications.')

Time and again, GM appeared out of touch. For years it failed to develop reliable small cars to compete with the Asian imports. As for alternative fuels, it dropped the ball entirely. Instead it focused on the short term profits of trucks and SUVs, confident that global warming was, in the immortal words of former vice chairman Bob Lutz, "a crock of (expetive deleted).

And while Wagoner's defenders were quick to argue that GM's problems were not of his making, consider that GM's stock has fallen to about $2 a share from $70 when he took over in 2000. Beyond parody.

There is little question in my mind that Obama's Automotive Task Force (ATF) is preparing itself for a quick and controlled Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by GM. Nothing in Wagoner's replacement, former GM Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson, gives me confidence he can come up with a restructuring plan in 60 days that will be bold enough for the ATF.

No, I think the ATF held off on forcing GM into bankruptcy to avoid a stock market meltdown. If Wagoner's dismissal was a shock, imagine the effect of GM suddenly declaring bankrupt? I think the stock market would have fallen a lot more than 250 points or so!

So we'll wait about two months while GM flounders around as usual - I doubt if even the shock of having its head cut off will be sufficient to clear the corporate political cobwebs - and then the ATF will force it into a well-prepared bankruptcy.

That will give the ATF the power to properly restructure the company. Without its authority, its bondholders and unions, let alone the inevitable corporate politics, could keep this pantomime going for years.

But as Obama said Monday, now that taxpayers are paying for the show, we've reached the end of that road.

At last.

- Peter C.T. Elsworth