“Binders Full Of Lies”: Mitt Romney Doubles Down On Auto Industry Lies
Mitt Romney has tried to dodge, bob, weave, change the subject, and pretend it didn’t happen when it comes to his position on the automobile companies.
But obfuscation is not enough for Mitt Romney: Now he is resorting to an outright lie in his speeches and in his last minute, desperate advertising. In fact, two big lies.
Lie No. 1: Contrary to Romney’s claim, Detroit and Chrysler are not moving jobs and the making of Jeeps to China. In fact, they are selling Jeeps to China and they are adding $500 million and 1,100 workers to their Ohio Jeep plant. Chrysler smacked down Romney’s lie when he first said it and now Romney is up with an ad repeating the lie, ignoring Chrysler.
Chrysler Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne was forced to send employees an E-mail Tuesday afternoon: “I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China.”
Hello, Mitt? Apologize and take down your TV ad. Instead, he is buying more air time and putting up radio ads with the same lie.
But it gets worse.
Lie No. 2: This is the one Romney has been repeating over and over about the American auto industry—he would have saved it with his “managed bankruptcy.” I worked for GM; there was no way the auto companies could have survived without Barack Obama’s rescue and with the decision to provide bridge loans and government help. Romney’s plan was not Obama’s plan—as he would try and make you believe. His plan was to get private capital, and as Steve Rattner, who ran the rescue team, and everyone else has stated, there was no private money. Even the conservative Detroit News praised President Obama and referred to Romney’s “wrong-headedness on the auto bailout…he was wrong in suggesting the automakers could have found operating capital in the private markets.”
When Romney called for letting Detroit go bankrupt, he meant it, because his view was the popular one at the time—no more bailouts, no more government money or intervention, enough already. Romney was playing politics. And he knew no one would buy a car from a bankrupt car company, unless the government stepped in to help
Now that the hard decision that President Obama made to provide government loans is popular, Romney is singing a different tune. He is not only trying to give voters the impression that he would have saved Detroit, which is absurd, he is implying that Obama is part of a plot to ship Jeep jobs to China.
Romney will lie and say anything to get elected. Let’s hope the people of Ohio and the United States see through it by next Tuesday.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, October 30, 2012
“The Heartland Election”: Ultimately Determined By “Makers” Quite Different From The Ones In Paul Ryan’s Speeches
When Mayor Bobby J. Hopewell talks about the importance of manufacturing to this friendly Michigan town with a name that lends itself to song, he doesn’t reel off the usual list of heavy industries typically associated with the word “factory.”
He speaks of Kalsec, the Kalamazoo Spice Extraction Company founded in 1958 that produces and markets natural herbs and spices for food manufacturers. He mentions Fabri-Kal, a 62-year-old packaging company that describes itself as “the seventh-largest plastic thermoformer in North America.” Think of products in drug stores encased in heavy plastic. And he doesn’t leave out the pharmaceutical industry, long vital to his city’s economy.
Yes, we still make a lot of stuff in the United States of America, and one of the good things about this election is that it is likely to be decided in the nation’s industrial heartland — in the towns and cities of Ohio above all, but also in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
President Obama almost certainly needs these states to win reelection, and if he does, manufacturing is destined for a larger role in the American economic conversation. Many promises have been made this year to the people and the communities whose ability to thrive has long depended upon manufacturing. The campaign’s thrust should move them to the heart of our efforts to seek a path up from the financial catastrophe that engulfed the country in 2008.
For two decades now, we have acted as if nearly all of us are destined to work in the tech industry or health care — or to survive on money that trickles our way courtesy of the world of finance. But while Hopewell is proud of the part played in his city by universities and those engaged in work involving what he calls “intellectual property,” he adds: “We are major makers in the region.”
When Hopewell is asked if he used the term “makers” in the way Paul Ryan does in drawing a distinction between “makers” and “takers” — between those who produce and those who get government aid — this Democrat laughs heartily. No, he says, his views have little in common with Ryan’s. The mayor is talking about manufacturing, pure and simple.
Leaders of traditional factory towns are by no means interested in a stagnant world in which members of each generation follows their parents into the same old factory job. On the contrary, this city is proud of “The Kalamazoo Promise,” the remarkable initiative of anonymous local donors who have established a fund that pays for a college education for every graduate of the city’s schools.
In Parma, Ohio, the industrial suburb of Cleveland where both Bruce Springsteen and Bill Clinton recently campaigned on Obama’s behalf, Mayor Tim DeGeeter said the top priority of the city’s blue-collar workers is a college education for their children. Parma and places like it, he adds, also want the sort of economic development that creates higher-end jobs so graduates can stay in the area, “and not have to move to Phoenix or Charlotte.”
What both mayors are saying (there are many like them) is that they want the market system to work for their communities, but do not want to leave their citizens utterly at the mercy of decisions made by economic actors far away, or of economic forces that no one controls.
This is why the rescue of the auto industry has been such a defining campaign issue in the Midwest. In Parma, DeGeeter notes that the auto revival means that GM recently made a $20 million investment in its stamping plant in the city. “That helps me sleep at night,” he says.
Hopewell says that even though the auto industry is not as important to Kalamazoo as it is in the Detroit area, “you can’t be a Michigander and not understand the importance of the auto industry, and not understand what it has done for our state.” The Republican sweep in Michigan in 2010 suggested it might be open to the GOP’s presidential candidate this year. But so far, it has remained anchored in Obama’s camp.
More broadly, white voters without college educations are voting for Obama at nearly twice the rate in the Midwest as in the South. In the Midwest, Obama is drawing 41 percent of their votes, according to a recent Washington Post/ABC News Poll, compared with only 24 percent in the South. If Obama prevails, “makers” of a sort quite different from the ones in Ryan’s speeches will have played a central role.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 28, 2012
“Mitt Romney’s Halloween Tricks”: In This Season Of Trick Or Treat, The Emphasis Is Definitely On The Trick
All Hallows’ Eve is upon us, but not in its ordinary annual form. Instead we’re in the midst of the quadrennial version where an implacable army of hollow-eyed zombies—political junkies—consumes each day’s latest poll numbers like so many handfuls of candy corn. Voters, especially in swing states, endure what must seem like a waking nightmare of endless negative campaign commercials.
In this season of trick or treat, the emphasis is definitely on the trick.
Consider, for example, the costume that former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has been running around in all month: Ever since the first presidential debate in Colorado, the self-described “severely conservative” pol has been parading around as Mitt the mild moderate.
That was never more starkly on display than Monday night during the foreign policy-focused presidential debate. He had spent most of his campaign growling out neoconservative rhetoric about American exceptionalism aimed at obscuring the fact that he had few if any substantive policy differences with the president. (“It sounded like you thought that you’d do the same things we did, but you’d say them louder and somehow that—that would make a difference,” Obama needled him Monday.) But wearing his “moderate Mitt” costume on Monday, the GOP nominee changed his tune—he tried to out-peacenik the president (“We can’t kill our way out of this mess”) when he bothered trying to express any differences at all. His parade of agreements with the president made one wonder whether he shouldn’t have just worn an Obama mask out onto the stage.
And it wasn’t just his previous national security rhetoric he hoped to Etch A Sketch out of public memory. Romney continues to fight a rearguard action against his own written and spoken words about the auto bailout. He and Obama got into a heated exchange about his November 2008 New York Times op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” A seemingly indignant Romney declared that “the idea that has been suggested that I would liquidate the [auto] industry, of course not. Of course not.” Of course not, indeed—Romney didn’t advocate liquidation; he simply advocated a course of action that would have led to liquidation. It’s true that his op-ed contemplated the federal government providing guarantees, but they were for “post-bankruptcy financing.”
But at the time the companies needed more than post-bankruptcy federal guarantees; they needed cash to get them through the process, and that money wasn’t going to come from the private capital markets in late 2008 or early 2009. It was either taxpayer money or nothing. And that Romney clearly opposed. “There’s no question but that if you just write a check that you’re going to see these companies go out of business ultimately,” Romney told CBS News then in a video clip turned up this week by the Huffington Post. Later, during the Republican primary portion of his never-ending campaign, he railed against the policy. “My view with regards to the bailout was that…it was the wrong way to go,” he said during a 2011 debate.
Romney’s opposition to the bailout was easy. It was popular. But now it’s dogging him like a cheap slasher-flick monster that he can’t seem to kill, “moderate Mitt” guise or no. It has probably doomed him in Michigan and it may well prove his undoing in Ohio, which seems likely to decide the election.
This despite another trick which is proving a treat for Republicans: the myth of “Mitt-mentum.” The first debate undeniably gave Romney’s effort a jolt and helped him capitalize on a race that was already tightening. But with Obama winning the latter two debates, the race has seemed to stabilize into a walking dead heat. However that hasn’t stopped the Romney campaign from very visibly assuming the posture of a group coasting to an inexorable victory.
This has ranged from explicit gamesmanship (“…for the first time in six years, Romney folks E-mailed, ‘We’re going to win,’ ” Politico‘s Mike Allen reported in his “Playbook”) to subtler head faints meant to signal strength. See, for example, last week’s announcement that the GOP was pulling resources (which proved to be a single staffer) out of North Carolina to drip-drip-drip discussion of maybe, possibly re-entering Pennsylvania. “If Romney acts and speaks like a landslide is on the way, perhaps he can create the atmospherics he needs for a small and meaningful win,” Politico‘s Alexander Burns reported this week. As New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait and Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall have pointed out, this is a classic campaign-closing bluff last seen in 2000 when Karl Rove had George W. Bush doing a pre-election victory lap in California with an eye toward creating momentum through buzz.
And to some extent the current Romney bluff is working. Asked Wednesday at an Aspen Institute event who is winning, ABC News Political Director Amy Walter said that if “you look at the news coverage and you look at the data…you get two different answers.” The news narrative, she said, is one of an “ascendant” Romney with the “momentum.” But the data—state by state polls, for example—tell a different story. “The underneath numbers suggest that it’s still Obama’s race right now, that fundamentally he has got the edge in the Electoral College.”
Fables of Rom-mentum haven’t managed to crack that electoral lock yet. Neither has Romney’s transformation back into a moderate wiped away the damage he did to his electability during his conservative phase. But he still might solve that problem—and that’s the scariest Halloween news of all.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, October 26, 2012
“An Echo, Not A Choice”: How The Right Wing Lost In 2012
The right wing has lost the election of 2012.
The evidence for this is overwhelming, yet it is the year’s best-kept secret. Mitt Romney would not be throwing virtually all of his past positions overboard if he thought the nation were ready to endorse the full-throated conservatism he embraced to win the Republican nomination.
If conservatism were winning, does anyone doubt that Romney would be running as a conservative? Yet unlike Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, Romney is offering an echo, not a choice. His strategy at the end is to try to sneak into the White House on a chorus of me-too’s.
The right is going along because its partisans know Romney has no other option. This, too, is an acknowledgment of defeat, a recognition that the grand ideological experiment heralded by the rise of the tea party has gained no traction. It also means that conservatives don’t believe that Romney really believes the moderate mush he’s putting forward now. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if the conservatives are forgiving Romney because they think he is lying, what should the rest of us think?
Almost all of the analysis of Romney’s highly public burning of the right’s catechism focuses on such tactical issues as whether his betrayal of principle will help him win over middle-of-the-road women and carry Ohio. What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper.
It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been. In 2010, voters were upset about the economy, Democrats were demobilized, and President Obama wasn’t yet ready to fight. All the conservatives have left now is economic unease. So they don’t care what Romney says. They are happy to march under a false flag if that is the price of capturing power.
The total rout of the right’s ideology, particularly its neoconservative brand, was visible in Monday’s debate, in which Romney praised one Obama foreign policy initiative after another. He calmly abandoned much of what he had said during the previous 18 months. Gone were the hawkish assaults on Obama’s approach to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Israel, China and nearly everywhere else. Romney was all about “peace.”
Romney’s most revealing line: “We don’t want another Iraq.” Thus did he bury without ceremony the great Bush-Cheney project. He renounced a war he had once supported with vehemence and enthusiasm.
Then there’s budget policy. If the Romney/Paul Ryan budget and tax ideas were so popular, why would the candidate and his sidekick, the one-time devotee of Ayn Rand, be investing so much energy in hiding the most important details of their plans? For that matter, why would Ryan feel obligated to forsake his love for Rand, the proud philosopher of “the virtue of selfishness” and the thinker he once said had inspired his public service?
Romney knows that, by substantial margins, the country favors raising taxes on the rich and opposes slashing many government programs, including Medicare and Social Security. Since Romney’s actual plan calls for cutting taxes on the rich, he has to disguise the fact. Where is the conviction?
The biggest sign that tea party thinking is dead is Romney’s straight-out deception about his past position on the rescue of the auto industry.
The bailout was the least popular policy Obama pursued — and, I’d argue, one of the most successful. It was Exhibit A for tea partyers who accused our moderately progressive president of being a socialist. In late 2008, one prominent Republican claimed that if the bailout the Detroit-based automakers sought went through, “you can kiss the American automotive industry good-bye.” The car companies, he said, would “seal their fate with a bailout check.” This would be the same Mitt Romney who tried to pretend on Monday that he never said what he said or thought what he thought. If the bailout is now good politics, and it is, then free-market fundamentalism has collapsed in a heap.
“Ideas have consequences” is one of the conservative movement’s most honored slogans. That the conservatives’ standard-bearer is now trying to escape the consequences of their ideas tells us all we need to know about who is winning the philosophical battle — and, because ideas do matter, who will win the election.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 24, 2012
“Son Of Detroit”: Mitt Romney Profited From The Auto Bailout And Jobs Shipped To China
“I’m a son of Detroit. I was born in Detroit. My dad was head of a car company. I like American cars,” said Mitt Romney on Monday night when he met with President Obama to discuss foreign policy. “And I would do nothing to hurt the U.S. auto industry.”
That might be considered true—unless moving the most important American auto parts manufacturer to China counts as hurting the U.S. auto industry. But those words now stand as one of Romney’s most glaring falsehoods in the final debate.
Romney’s defensive statement came in response to a remark by Obama noting that the Republican nominee is “familiar with jobs being shipped overseas because you invested in companies that were shipping jobs overseas.” Moments later, he added: “If we had taken your advice, Governor Romney about our auto industry, we’d be buying cars from China instead of selling cars to China.”
Most viewers had little idea what Obama was talking about or why Romney felt the need to rebut him so specifically. But their coded exchange almost certainly referred to an investigative report that broke wide on the Internet, without much attention from the mainstream media so far—Greg Palast’s article in The Nation magazine, exposing Romney’s huge profits from Delphi, a crucial auto parts company that moved nearly all of its jobs to China after taking billions in auto bailout money from the Treasury.
As Palast reported, the Romneys made millions from that intricate deal, put together by one of his main campaign donors, billionaire investor Paul Singer — through a “vulture fund” known as Elliot Management. Having bought up Delphi at fire-sale prices, Singer and his partners essentially blackmailed the Treasury into paying them billions so that Delphi would keep supplying parts to General Motors and Chrysler. They stiffed the company’s pensioners, pocketed the bailout funds, and moved all but four of the firm’s 29 plants to China.
The neglect of the Delphi story by mainstream and even progressive outlets such as MSNBC has been remarkable, particularly because neither Romney nor his campaign has denied it. If anything, a statement issued by the campaign to The Hill, a Washington publication, seemed to confirm Palast’s reporting by attempting to deflect blame onto the Obama administration:
Romney’s campaign did not deny that he profited from the auto bailout in an email to The Hill Wednesday afternoon, but it said the the report showed the Detroit intervention was “misguided.”
“The report states that Delphi had 29 US plants before the misguided Obama auto bailout, and just four after. Is this really what the president views as success?” Romney spokeswoman Michele Davis said.
“Mitt Romney would have taken a different path to turning around the auto industry,” Davis continued. “As President, Mitt Romney will create jobs and give American workers the recovery they deserve.”
Taking Delphi bankrupt under the management of Singer and Romney’s other partners didn’t create jobs or security for Delphi’s American workers. After taking nearly $13 billion in bailout financing from the Treasury — with the support of Rep. Paul Ryan, who has also received generous support from Singer — the new Delphi management abrogated the company’s pensions, closed all those U.S. plants, and moved production to China. And so far, Romney has escaped any questions about why he and Ann Romney invested their millions with vulture investors who used taxpayer funds to destroy American jobs.
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, October 23, 2012
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