Anyone at General Motors who has been around for a while probably gets the same eerie feeling of deja vu that I do whenever I hear CEO Ed Whitacre speak.

Whitacre's Texas drawl reminds me of Ross Perot, who was in town as a GM director for a couple of years in the mid-1980s after the automaker paid $2.6 billion to acquire Electronic Data Systems Inc., which Perot had founded.

I'm not sure the automotive press corps has warmed up to Whitacre yet. There probably hasn't been enough time, although Whitacre has had a couple of roundtable meetings with reporters since replacing Fritz Henderson as CEO in early December.

But reporters sure loved Perot. He was plain-spoken, direct and asked tough questions that GM's honchos wouldn't answer. He criticized management and his fellow directors.

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