I remember back when Obama first came into office and he was trying to stop the free-fall in the economy, polling consistently showed that the auto bailout was the least popular of his emergency measures. Of course, the bailout originated with the Bush administration which provided a bridge-loan to keep the industry afloat until Obama could settle on a strategy. I was always a little confused about why people were so hostile to the idea of saving the auto industry. I have deep roots in Michigan and went to college there, so I understand the culture. And I kind of chalked up the national polling numbers to the fact that most people are not familiar with Michigan’s culture and did not understand the kind of devastation they were facing. I’ve read that even today, though, Republicans in Michigan oppose the bailout. I don’t know how to explain that at all. My best guess is that the right-wing media wurlitzer is so effective at reaching Republican voters that it can make them believe anything, no matter how contrary to their experience and culture.
It’s a mystery to me that Mitt Romney is polling even with Santorum in Michigan. After advocating a liquidation of General Motors and Chrysler, I’m surprised Romney can even walk freely in the state. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) does a great job of eviscerating Romney’s positions on the bailout in today’s Detroit Free Press.
Romney has criticized President Barack Obama for not arranging a “managed bankruptcy” for General Motors and Chrysler, which he called his preferred option. Of course, managed bankruptcy is precisely what happened to both companies. Romney has claimed that his real problem is the government’s financing of the automakers’ bankruptcies. Of course, private financing was impossible in the midst of the worst financial crisis in generations. Government refusal to provide financing would have been the death knell for both companies.
Having lost those two arguments, Romney is trying out two new ones. They appear to boil down to this: Bond speculators should have been protected at the expense of workers, and taxpayers should dump our investment in GM now, even if it means we take a bath.
I know it’s a little complicated, but the bottom line is that what Mitt Romney advocated was to let the automakers go broke. He wanted the government to stay out of it, which would have meant that the companies would have had to liquidate in order to pay off their creditors. They would have gone out of business. The option Romney advocated wasn’t possible because there was no private capital available. That’s the key fact in this dispute. If you can’t agree on that fact, then you’re just engaging in bullshit.
Now, Romney has tried to contort himself in countless ways to explain away his original position. He’s said that the government actually followed his advice and took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. But his advice was for the government to stay out of it. He’s said that his problem is the shareholders took a bath and the unions got a sweet deal. That’s an odd stance to take politically, and it ignores that the unions took a gigantic hit themselves. And he’s argued that the government should divest itself from GM immediately, even though, as Senator Levin points out, that would be a very unwise way to manage the taxpayers’ money.
This is what happens when you take a poll-driven position that is wrong on the merits. Romney opposed the bailout because he saw it as a way to score political points. Because the bailout was deeply unpopular, he assumed that he’d be well-placed later on for having opposed it. And so one piece of bullshit begat another and begat another and begat another. In the end, Romney wound up in the same place he wound up with ObamaCare, out on an island surrounded by a sea of contradictory nonsense and lies, looking like the most inauthentic man to ever run for high office.
