Should a media-and-money maven become the car czar?

The speculation that Steven Rattner is the front-runner to become the Obama administration's "car czar" hasn't yet been met with a hot blast of outrage in the automotive world. This is slightly disconcerting, because Rattner—a major Wall Street player and Democratic fundraising machine—is no car guy. The fortune he has amassed derives from the murky sphere of media and communications.

If he becomes the car czar, he'll be overseeing the heavy-metal fate of the Detroit automakers in unprecedented fashion, forcing the U.S. auto industry to restructure in return for a $17.4 billion lifeline from the taxpayer. In some ways, this would fulfill Rattner's long-harbored ambition to occupy the national political stage. But it will also call into question how seriously Obama takes the plight of the American car business.

There's a whiff of a payback appointment here, as well as an acknowledgment that Rattner, for all his much-lauded savvy and success—his firm, Quadrangle, manages Michael Bloomberg's billions—isn't quite treasury secretary material. There's also the possibility that the Rattner appointment would itself be a bailout of sorts, as the one-time wunderkind has been racking up some losses of late.

Given the blundering management of the industry for the past few decades, it's clear we need the czar, if only to keep GM, Chrysler, and eventually Ford on their toes. (Having borrowed billions before the credit crunch, Ford was able to decline the bailout money, at least during the first round.) But is a Wall Street denizen the man for the job? He may have strategic-oversight skills, but could he be a bit too symbolic of over-the-top investment banking?

For pretty much the entirety of the boom era, roughly from the election of Ronald Reagan to Great Depression Deux, Rattner has been a source of wonder, envy, and dismay among the journalistic and financial elite. He left the fast track at the New York Times (and a BFF relationship with the paper of record's dauphin, Arthur Sulzberger Jr.) in 1982 to join Lehman Bros., just as investment banking was switching from stodgy to sexy. Since then, his rise has been chronicled by his former peers in intricate, psychologically elaborate detail.

In 1986, Philip Weiss contributed a definitive account in the Washington Monthly. Weiss' portrait of a Machiavellian mega-striver—and early convert to the money culture—contrasts vividly with the narrative of Rattner's evolution into an older, mercilessly Delphic smoothie that Michael Wolff offered in his 2005 book Autumn of the Moguls. Rattner Googles deep. And he doesn't always Google pretty. But he also has a knack for seeing the curve before anyone else even attempts to get ahead of it. He may have been wrong about the severity of the recession, but in a June 2007 commentary for the Wall Street Journal, he basically called the financial crisis more than a year ahead of the meltdown.