WASHINGTON, July 29, 2010 (AFP) – The White House on Thursday said its multi-billion dollar auto industry bailout had saved a million jobs and brought the fabled sector back from the brink of collapse.

Administration officials cranked up an effort to highlight what they see as an important success for the 64-billion-dollar program, a day before President Barack Obama visits GM and Chrysler plants in Detroit, Michigan.

Officials also said they still hoped that General Motors would still be able to go ahead with its Initial Public Offering (IPO) later this year, to allow taxpayers to begin recouping their investment in the firm.

Just over a year ago, GM and Chrysler emerged from a bankruptcy process framed by the White House, after what Obama aides say was a "tough" unpopular decision by the president, which has now borne fruit.

They will argue that Obama's stewardship of the car firm is a sign that his other, sometimes unpopular prescriptions for the shattered US economy will work, as polls showing growing doubts about his economic leadership.

GM has already turned to profit, and there are hopes Chrysler will follow suit soon. Ford managed to ride out the worst economic crisis in generations without resorting to bankruptcy or government money.

"In the year before the bankruptcies, these companies lost almost 340,000 jobs," said Ron Bloom, a senior advisor to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

"In the year since then, 55,000 jobs have been added into these companies; if we hadn't stepped in when we did, most observers believe at least a million jobs would have been lost."

Bloom appeared to be referring not just to Chrysler and GM, but to the large web of suppliers which manufacture components for the plants, which would also likely have gone under if the big auto giants had collapsed.

Bloom also restated the administration's hope that GM will mount its IPO this year. "We continue to be hopeful in that regard," he said.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs meanwhile took aim at critics of the bailout, who at the time slammed Obama for what they said was an anti-free market government takeover of the auto industry.

He took special aim at conservative radio talk show baron Rush Limbaugh who renamed GM as "Obama Motors" on his show on Wednesday and criticized the 41,000 dollar price of its new product, the hybrid Chevrolet Volt.

"Rush Limbaugh and others wanted to walk away. Rush Limbaugh and others saw a million people that worked at these factories... and thought we should all just walk away," Gibbs said.

"The president didn't think that walking away from a million jobs in these communities made a lot of economic sense."