Car buff Romney could get run over by auto-industry stand

DETROIT -- Mitt Romney always loved cars. He liked to sit next to his older sister and pretend to drive when he was 4 years old.

Soon afterward, "we found out he could identify any car by glancing at the quarter panel," his older brother, Scott Romney, told me five years ago, during the former Massachusetts governor's first run for president.

Today, the second-time presidential candidate still proclaims his love for "not any cars, American cars," as he said in a Valentine's Day op-ed column in the Detroit News. Yet his position on cars could doom his candidacy, at least in Michigan, where he was born in 1947 to a father who would become head of the former American Motors Co.

Although he likes to speak lovingly of "chrome and fins and roaring motors," when the domestic auto industry was at the point of death a little over three years ago, Mr. Romney would have let it die.

In November, 2008, the month President Obama was elected, the New York Times published a now-infamous column by Mr. Romney. The headline: "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."

That was not popular in Michigan then, and is less so now that the bailout and the "soft" bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler that followed turned out to be successes. The nonprofit Center for Automotive Research estimated that as many as 3 million jobs might have disappeared if the companies had failed.

Today, Chrysler, GM, and Ford are profitable, and the second two are making billions of dollars. The automakers are adding workers. Morale is on the rise.

Yet even so, Mr. Romney still says the bailout was a bad idea: "crony capitalism on a grand scale."

He paints a lurid picture of the President selling out to the "union boss-controlled trust fund." He adds: "I believe that without his [President Obama's] intervention things would be better."

Not surprisingly, that view has few supporters in the auto industry. Steven Rattner, the head of the Obama task force that oversaw the reorganization of Chrysler and GM, denounced Mr. Romney in scathing terms.

Interviewed after the candidate's op-ed column appeared in the News, Mr. Rattner called his claims "ridiculous," and asserted that "those companies would have closed their doors and liquidated" without the bailout.

Thanks in part to the financial turmoil at the time, the auto czar says there simply was no private cash available to rescue the automakers. The candidate's position, argues Mr. Rattner, himself a Wall Street financier with a background that includes stints at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, is designed to pander to the Tea Party right.

"He's afraid of being perceived as a moderate," Mr. Rattner adds.

The way Mr. Romney tells it, he deserves more credit than President Obama for the industry's survival. He now says that he was always in favor of the sort of managed bankruptcy that Chrysler and GM eventually went through.

"The course I recommended was originally followed," Mr. Romney says of the bankruptcies. The candidate says the problem is that before that, "the federal government swept in with an $85 billion sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan," something he hints was a plot to reward "Obama's union allies on the taxpayer's dime."

Industry experts have pointed out that the United Auto Workers did not get anything like the terms it first asked for. And while the column excoriates President Obama, there is no mention of the presumably evil genius who began the sellout of the taxpayers, who first gave the automakers billions of bailout dollars.

That would be President George W. Bush.

Nobody yet knows whether Mr. Romney's tough stance on the auto bailout will win over the conservatives who are expected to dominate Michigan primary voting on Feb. 28. This week, the GOP establishment was shocked by polls showing Mr. Romney, who won the Michigan primary easily in 2008, badly trailing former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a virtual unknown in the state just a month ago.

The native son clearly needs to do something. Yet even if his anti-bailout stance manages to win him the primary and, ultimately, the GOP nomination, it might prove a poison pill.

Michigan Democrats have been denouncing Mr. Romney's "betrayal," of the auto industry. Former Gov. Jennifer Granholm said it was a case of "stabbing us in the back."

Winning Michigan in the presidential election might, in any event, be a long shot for Mr. Romney. The last time any Republican carried Michigan in a presidential race was 1988, when George H.W. Bush beat the hapless Michael Dukakis.

But being perceived as anti-auto could be a serious handicap for Mr. Romney in Toledo and elsewhere in northwest Ohio, where autos are a big part of the economy. No Republican ever has been elected without carrying Ohio. Any GOP nominee has to take Ohio to have any prayer of upsetting the incumbent.

Democrats have been fairly restrained so far, but it is certain that their fall campaign will feature an ad blitz focused on Republicans' willingness to let the auto industry go under.

When Mr. Romney was a student at Brigham Young University in Utah, other young men his age were fighting in Vietnam. A saying associated with that war was: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

In the end, it would be ironic indeed if the son of a famous auto executive ended up dooming his candidacy by the measures he took to win the nomination. Including, that is, attacking the policies that saved the signature industry -- and the economy -- of his native state.

Jack Lessenberry, a member of the journalism faculty at Wayne State University in Detroit and The Blade's ombudsman, writes on issues and people in Michigan.

Contact him at: omblade@aol.com