More on Romney on the auto industry rescue

As noted in this previous post, Mitt Romney wrote in 2009 that the federal rescue plan for General Motors “would be as ineffective as it is un-American,” confidently predicted continuing losses and a continuing stream taxpayer subsidies into the indefinite future, and concluded, “What is proposed is even worse than bankruptcy — it would make GM the living dead.” But now that GM has reported record profits, he’s all but claiming credit.

(I’m reminded that last October 28 conservative columnist George Will complained of Romney’s “seeming to lack the courage of his absence of convictions.”)

Tom Walsh’s concise Thursday column for the Detroit Free Press has some more about what he calls Romney’s “verbal gymnastics.” Walsh notest that Romney recently assured his newspaper’s editorial board that he’d have somehow arranged a rescue using private sources of funding, conveniently overlooking the financial crisis that had paralyzed private capital markets at the time. Walsh writes (referencing in passing an op-ed Romney wrote in 2008):

It’s easy to understand Romney’s tortured attempts to parse words in such a way as to seem semi-reasonable to an independent voter yet reliably anti-Obama and anti-labor enough for the GOP’s staunch right wing. I even had to smile when he tried the old it-was-a-bad-headline excuse, wishing that the ’08 article had been titled “How to Save Detroit” instead of “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

One wonders if the exhausted Romney can remember at the end of the day what he actually believes.

Update: You might be interested in two more brief commentaries on the same subject from Rich Yeselson and Steve Benen.



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