Barack Obama is no Jimmy Carter. The latter really did face the unraveling of an indispensable industry. Mr. Obama faces not a collapse of the domestic auto industry, but collapse of two companies miserable enough to have been extant in the 1930s when the Wagner Act was foisted upon the industry.

We have a second auto industry, founded after the political and legal system had thought better of mandatory unionization, born of foreign parents, mostly in the South. It's surviving the recession without extraordinary help.

In...