Romney is desperate. And if you want to judge a man, see how he behaves when he is desperate. What does he do? Who does he throw under the bus?
One key difference between politicians in the third world and developed world is that in the third world they take the money and do nothing, in the developed world they are just as corrupt, but HAVE to do something.
And one thing Obama has definitely done is save the U.S. auto industry. And it is NOT just the bailout I am talking about. “Obamacare” is in fact a savior of the Auto Industry, too. GM executives will happily tell anyone that before Obama came to office, they were paying more in health insurance per car then the cost of the engine inside it. Soft costs were the single biggest issue GM was facing – not hard costs.
And this situation gave newly opened car companies in the U.S. – such as Toyota or Honda a huge advantage because they carefully designed their employee benefit programs to avoid a huge surge in benefit costs. GM was saddled with commitments it had made many decades ago when its work force was a lot younger.
The auto bailout and the new health care law together have revitalized American Auto manufacturers. And in the process over a million direct jobs were saved and possibly 10x that figure in indirect jobs. Romney cannot take that away from Obama. He did something!
Ohio is widely considered to be a key state that could determine who the next president of the United States will be. Ohio also has a very large number of auto industry related jobs. Out of desperation, Romney’s campaign is doing everything it can to eliminate Obama’s huge advantage in protecting auto industry jobs. And with this desperation, Romney pulled in a new Ohio campaign ad that appears to suggest — falsely — that Chrysler is moving U.S. jobs to China. And on the back of this ad, they are going around telling people that GM has now laid off 15,000 workers.
The Chrysler ad doubles down on a statement that Romney made on the campaign trail last week, when he told a crowd in Defiance, Ohio, that Chrysler was moving production on its Jeep models from Ohio to China.
“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney said. “I will fight for every good job in America.”
The claim is completely misleading and false, and provoked an outcry from Democrats and reporters. The report, from Bloomberg, actually said that Chrysler is talking about adding Jeep production in China in order to serve the Chinese market. Jeep production in North America would continue unchanged.
Chrysler even sought to clarify this in a blog post last week:
“Fiat Says Jeep® Output May Return to China as Demand Rises” stated “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley (President and CEO of the Jeep brand) referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”
Despite clear and accurate reporting, the take has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. workforce. It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.
Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It’s simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world’s largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation. A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.
But despite the fact that Romney’s claim was demonstrably wrong, his campaign is doubling down in the new ad, which went on air this weekend in Ohio.
“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China,” the ad says. “Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.”
Romney campaign aides have pointed out that the ad doesn’t actually say that Chrysler is moving U.S. jobs to China. Still, that message is strongly implied. And perhaps tellingly, the Romney campaign did not announce the ad’s release over the weekend, and has stayed publicly silently over the criticism.
The ad appears to be a last-ditch effort to reverse Obama’s key advantage in Ohio, a must-win swing state where 1 in 8 voters are employed by the auto sector. Romney, who trails by an average of 2 points in Ohio, has taken a big hit in the state for his criticism of the Obama administration’s auto bailout.
Ads that mislead or stretch the truth are nothing new for presidential campaigns. But this ad — and Romney’s comments last week — has prompted harsh criticism from the media, likely because it strikes reporters as not only disingenuous, but irresponsible. For Romney to suggest that the livelihoods of specific voters — namely workers at the Jeep plant in Toledo — are in danger in order to win an election comes across to many as the type of fear-mongering that no one wants in a president.
Seeing an opening in the outcry, the Obama campaign pounced Monday. In a conference call with reporters Monday morning, Obama’s campaign manager Jim Messina suggested that the ad was a “desperate” move by the Romney campaign, calling it “one of the most misleading, hypocritical and indefensible ads we’ve seen in a presidential race.”
Later, on another press conference call, Ken Lortz, a United Auto Workers leader in Toledo, said that Romney’s ad had only upset Ohioans “who know better.”
“We knew he wasn’t on our side when the economy and the industry was on the brink,” Lortz said “But the fact that he would lie to our faces and try to deceive us is just too much.”
Today, GM too came out and completely refuted Romney’s statements. Romney, whose father was an auto industry executive has now completely alienated himself from the current executives in the Auto industry, and above all from the huge number of companies and employees that are affiliated with this industry. This is downright stupid.
Romney is clearly desperate. But he has also shown his true character. Liar, liar – pants on fire. So much for his ‘religiosity’. Mr. Romney, according to your faith – lying is a sin. I say go to hell, along with Republican party’s Christian fanatics who hate Iranians.
