WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama seems to be more interested in propping up Wall Street than saving the car companies and the auto workers in Detroit.

He displayed his "get tough" side when he laid down the law to General Motors and Chrysler, whose restructuring plans had displeased the White House auto task force.

The president gave the car makers a choice of coming up with tougher plans or face bankruptcy. GM was given 60 days to produce a plan for Obama, who has never ran a company, and Chrysler was given 30 days, with a threat to end its federal aid unless it merged with Fiat, the Italian automaker.

Bailout funds were Obama’s price for their concessions.

Although he has allowed a few financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers to go down the drain in the current economic crisis, the administration’s financial advisers said other banking houses were too big to be allowed to fail.

If only the Obama administration also had said that the thousands upon thousands of jobless auto workers and suppliers were too important to be allowed to drift into poverty.

The bankers and big investors are taking big bailouts while the blue collar workers are left out in the cold. So what else is new? In an extraordinary government intervention, Obama forced Rick Wagoner, GM’s chief executive, out of the company as a symbol that times were changing, dramatically.

Though he was picked to take the fall, Wagoner won’t go hungry. His retirement package at G.M. is reportedly worth more than $20 million as he heads out the door.

In rejecting General Motor’s proposed make over, Obama’s auto task force said GM had been "far too slow" to adapt and needed a more aggressive restructuring blueprint.

Obama, who wants it both ways, said GM ’s proposed plan wasn’t tough enough but that he was "absolutely confident that G.M. can rise again."

The White House’s handling of the auto situation raises the question of whether the government has a role in dictating to business in a free society. In my opinion, the current state of the economy calls for more regulation of banks and businesses, if only to save them from their own rapacious stupidity.

If the Obama administration has its way, GM will have a new look. The giant company would have fewer models, brands and dealers. Thousands more jobs would be cut and more concessions will be asked of the thousands of bondholders and the United Automobile Workers union.

The 100-year-old once-mighty GM may be reduced to producing only Chevrolets and Cadillacs. Its European division may have seen its last days. James Womack, chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute of Cambridge, Mass. -- a company that promotes efficiency -- declared: "The old GM is dead and that needs to be said."

Remember the time when GM reigned supreme and Charlie Wilson, former head of the company, was ridiculed when he said: "what’s good for General Motors is good for the country"?

The thriving Ford Motor Company may be the only survivor of the current meltdown. It all evokes too many memories of the Great Depression, and the long lines of job seekers in front of the auto plants in the 1930s.

It’s quite a contrast with the gentle treatment of Wall Street. After a White House spoon-feeding last week, a select group of bankers walked away with smiles following their meeting with Obama. "We’re all in this together," one of them opined.

I confess to a personal interest, having grown up in Detroit and having seen so many families weather the ups and downs in that beleaguered, often maligned city.

But my home town rose to the occasion when it transformed its auto assembly lines to build planes and jeeps and tanks for the allied forces during World War II.

With so many spirits down, Detroiters are uplifted by the staging there of the NCAA’s "Final Four" collegiate basketball tournament this weekend.

Have fun.