Ohio senator and Mitt Romney campaign co-chair Rob Portman earlier today in Avon Lake, Ohio, making the case that it's Mitt Romney, not President Barack Obama, who deserves credit for the plan that saved the auto industry:



ROB PORTMAN: It was Barack Obama who took GM and Chrysler through bankruptcy, okay. Right? Am I right? Second, it was Mitt Romney who actually did provide for loan guarantees to make sure the warranties were backed up.

Simply stunning, isn't it? I mean, you'd think they'd be satisfied enough with their dishonest claim that Chrysler and Jeep are shipping American jobs to China even though the reality is that Chrysler is expanding its workforce to build more Jeeps here in America. But no, they aren't content to stop there: Now they want Mitt Romney to get credit for Obama's auto rescue plan.

Remember, Mitt Romney's plan was to let Detroit go bankrupt:



IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed. Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

Yes, Romney included one line in his article saying that after bankruptcy, he would be open to providing loan guarantees to the car companies. The problem is that if they'd gone into bankruptcy without sufficient financing, they would have collapsed during the bankruptcy rendering Romney's post-bankruptcy plan moot. Basically, Romney said he'd was open to putting the patient on life support ... but not until the coroner filled out the death certificate.

Obama, on the other hand, took a huge political risk by giving the auto industry the financial support it needed before restructuring during the managed bankruptcy process. Mitt Romney said Obama's plan would kill the auto industry, but he was wrong: The industry is now booming. And instead of admitting he was wrong, Romney is now having his campaign say he deserves credit for providing the financial support in the plan that he passionately opposed.

If it were anyone else, this would be a shocking display of historical revisionism. With Mitt Romney, however, this kind of thing happens all too often. For him, it's just another day in the campaign. Fortunately, however, this time the press isn't letting it go.

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