ONCE THE LOCOMOTIVE THAT PULLED AMERICA’S ECONOMY, THE GENERAL HAS BECOME A NON-STARTER: WHAT’S GOOD FOR GENERAL MOTORS IS A MATTER OF NO IMPORTANCE

General Motors Corp.’s executives are emerging as the Rodney Dangerfield of the American economy — they don’t get any respect.

For two months, they completely shut down the nation’s largest industrial enterprise — a behemoth with 165,000 domestic employees and annual revenues of $170 billion, or roughly the gross national product of Denmark. And nobody really cared.

In fact, the strike settled last week proved more embarrassing than troubling. As its domestic rivals notched blowout quarters, GM reported the strike knocked $1.2 billion off its bottom line. To compound matters, the United Auto Workers’ attention-grabbing job action provided journalists and commentators with the opportunity to highlight the venerable company’s continuing problems:

* How GM, which sold about half of all the cars in the United States in the late 1950s, has seen its domestic market share plummet to a pathetic 30%.

* How its ranks of senior management have risen 47% since 1992, in an era of broad corporate downsizing.

* How GM has consistently failed to update tired old brands and to cash in on the sport utility craze.

Oddly, state and federal officials took a rather blase attitude toward the whole affair. Sure, some Chicken Little economists warned of the strike’s long-term effects — it could after all, shave up to 50 basis points off second-quarter GNP as industrial production and capacity utilization slow. And companies that supply GM with everything from steel to semiconductors are preannouncing profit hits. But after six consecutive years of economic expansion and a stock market seemingly fueled by concentrated helium, the collective reaction was: So what? Like cafeteria workers reluctant to step into an ugly food fight, Clinton administration officials and congressional leaders seemingly were content to watch from the sidelines and cluck their tongues.

The ho-hum reaction to the GM strike provides an object lesson in the workings of the happy-go-lucky Clinton economy, one in which continued growth is taken as a given, employment prospects are always positive, and information and silicon are far more important and valuable commodities than chrome and rubber.

The Dow has risen about 3% since June 16, setting record after record. In a prior era, it would have been hard to imagine any index of “industrial stocks” performing well while one of its largest components sat idle — especially GM, the dominant American corporation for decades. In the early 1950s, when GM President Charles Wilson was nominated by President Eisenhower to be secretary of defense, he testified there could be no conflict of interest between his public service and his extensive GM stock holdings, “because for years I have thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” And when GM encountered a sales slump in 1957, it triggered a nationwide recession the following year.

In 1964, GM sported a stunning $28.45 billion market cap — equivalent to about 1.6% of that year’s GNP. Its executives and their technologically and financially savvy colleagues in the auto industry were regarded as whiz kids — occupying a spot in the popular and commercial culture similar to that held by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs today.

For decades, the CEO of GM was a major player in social policy, politics and trade issues. The legendary Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and his successors were not only celebrities, they were essential contributors to the war effort in World War II and to the country’s overall economic well-being. This held true as late as the early 1970s, when ancient economist John Kenneth Galbraith declared: “The public decisions of General Motors in the course of any year are more consequential than those of any state legislature.”

Today, however, GM’s top honchos don’t get invited to stay at the White House (like Dreamworks’ David Geffen), or testify before Congress (like Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy) or rub shoulders with other moguls at Herb Allen’s annual fete in Sun Valley, Idaho (like Bill Gates). In fact, they don’t do much of anything in the public eye. Quick, name GM’s last three CEOs. (If you guessed “Smith,” you got two of them right.)

The profile of current CEO Jack Smith is something akin to that of failed presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Indeed, the only GM executive to gain any real measure of celebrity in the last decade was former CEO Roger Smith — as the subject of a remarkably unflattering portrayal in Michael Moore’s 1989 documentary “Roger and Me.”

It’s not just in the popular imagination that GM’s star has fallen. When the Wall Street Journal published a list of the top 15 companies in market value last month, GM didn’t even come close to making it. At about $45 billion, its market capitalization is only 60% higher than it was 34 years ago, lower than that of Ford ($70 billion), and slipping dangerously toward that of Chrysler ($36 billion). To make matters worse, this 90-year-old company, which brought us the Cadillac and the Corvette, is worth less than a few lousy Internet stocks that have yet to turn consistent profits. Total the market caps of Amazon.com, America Online and Yahoo!, and you’ll see that the Street values the Cyber Big Three more than it does GM.

The fact that the onetime “chrome colossus,” with annual revenues of $175 billion, is worth less than three Internet companies tells us a great deal about how value is created and lost in the new economy. In the weeks after the strike started, GM’s stock sank about 10% from its 52-week high — lopping $4.5 billion off its market cap. Between June 15 and July 22, Intel tacked on five times that amount to its already immense market cap.

So perhaps Washington can be forgiven for not rushing to intervene in the strike. (Especially when the group likely to be most deeply affected by the lockout — auto dealers — is among the least popular on the planet.)

The sad truth that General Motors executives have yet to realize is that making cars may no longer be regarded as essential to the functioning of our economy. Imagine if workers struck AOL, thus cutting off Internet service for millions of individuals and businesses. Or if Fidelity Investments were to be hit by a job action, locking 12 million investors out of their brokerage accounts. President Clinton and Labor Secretary Alexis Herman would surely call the relevant parties in for a tongue-lashing faster than Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr slaps subpoenas on Secret Service agents.

Its market capitalization is only 60% higher than it was 34 years ago

Daniel Gross, who grew up in GM country (East Lansing, Mich.), writes monthly on money and politics for InvestmentNews.