Michael Conroy/Associated Press

Mitt Romney’s claim that his ideas contributed to the revival of the auto industry is preposterous and easy enough to knock down. It’s exhausting, however, to refute each and every laughable distortion or outright untruth that he and his campaign issue virtually every day.

Mr. Romney told a Cleveland television station yesterday that he would “take a lot of credit” for the industry’s comeback because he recommended that General Motors and Chrysler go through bankruptcy, which they did. “I pushed the idea of a managed bankruptcy and finally when that was done, and help was given, the companies got back on their feet,” he said.





To anyone with the slightest knowledge of what happened in Detroit in 2008 and 2009, that’s a breathtaking statement. The companies didn’t survive simply because they declared bankruptcy; they were bailed out with $80 billion in taxpayer money. That proved to be one of the government’s best investments in modern times, and 1.45 million people are working as a direct result of it.

And Mitt Romney unequivocally opposed that bailout.

He didn’t just oppose it in 2008, when he wrote a notorious op-ed essay for The New York Times saying if the bailout were granted, “you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” He also said the bailout was unnecessary while campaigning for the Michigan primary earlier this year, defying the auto executives who say that’s nonsense. Even the newspaper that endorsed him, the Detroit News, said the government saved the industry from “the darkest hour of its history.”

It’s unlikely Mr. Romney will be able to get away with this kind of thing in Michigan, where people know better. But for months he and his campaign have pushed the boundaries of veracity on a huge range of subjects, from the number of jobs created during the Obama administration to the economy’s effect on women to the phony “apology tour” he claims the president has taken.

For these crimes against accuracy he is chided by newspaper fact checkers and denounced by editorialists. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post regularly notes how much Mr. Romney is counting on the public’s amnesia about the depth of the recession and its generally faulty memory of recent events, such as the Detroit bailout.

Otherwise, the Romney campaign hasn’t paid much of a price for its untruths. Mr. Obama has done his share of exaggerating, too, and voters may figure that all politicians do it. That’s a false equivalency: unlike Mr. Romney’s campaign, the president’s is grounded in reality.