How you arrive to the pitch room sets the mood for your whole presentation. That’s why the car executives bungled so badly by all taking fancy private jets to Washington on the day they asked taxpayers to pay them $25 billion. Brian Ross of ABC news exposed the auto executives as idiots. Worse, once exposed, they refused to acknowledge there was any problem with this extravagance. The executives are showing that they just don’t understand how they have to restructure at every level. Their rational is that their board of directors requires them to travel on private planes because of “security concerns.” The thinking is that these execs are worth so many hundreds of millions of dollars that they are at high risk of kidnap. Maybe, in the past, but if they are paid a dollar a year, then no one will want to kidnap them.

The executives could have spun this PR disaster in their favor. Any one of them could have said this the day after their private jet fiasco emerged. “I was wrong to have taken a private jet to DC when asking for public money from taxpayers. I have seen the light. I have called an emergency meeting of my board and recommended that we sell our fleet of jets and passed a companywide policy that all executives here will fly coach at all times. There is a new era of belt tightening. The board unanimously agreed and the proposal was passed. There is a new era of belt-tightening here in Detroit and I intent to lead by example.”

A statement like that would go a long way to repairing Detroit’s image, but the statement never came.