Monday, April 30, 2012

Chutzpah. Also Amnesia.

The Washington Post quotes Mitt Romney's "senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom" asserting that the Auto Industry Bailout was really his bosses idea.
“[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed,” Fehrnstrom said. “He said, ‘If you want to save the auto industry, just don’t write them a check. That will seal their doom. What they need to do is go through a managed bankruptcy process.’

“Consider that the crown jewel. The only economic success that President Obama has had,” Fehrnstrom said, “is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice.”
Unsurprisingly, if not predictably, a quick Google search yields an op-ed penned by Mr. Romney and published in The New York Times, on November 18th, 2008 titled:
Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
The op-ed itself is an exercise in free-market lionization and general supply-side tropes, without any specific plan, aside from "[...] automakers should come up with a win-win proposition," by undergoing a managed bankruptcy in a historically tight credit market.

Not only that, Mr. Romney also wrote another op-ed[1], published on Feburary 14th, this year, lamenting that:
“The president tells us that without his intervention things in Detroit would be worse. I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”
and
“The indisputable good news is that Chrysler and General Motors are still in business. The equally indisputable bad news is that all the defects in President Obama’s management of the American economy are evident in what he did.”
What makes Mr. Fehrstrom's assertion so outrageous is not only the chutzpah required to say that Mr. Romney's advocacy to force GM, Ford and Crysler into a managed bankruptcy "was exactly what Obama followed," but the amnesia required to ignore Mr. Romney's own written statements decrying the President's decisions that are, according to Mr. Fehrnstrom, supposed to be his own.

[1] A note on the citations: The Detroit News does not have a digital copy of Mr. Romney's op-ed on their website. The quotes were taken from The Hill's Ballot Box, which is linked above.

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