Mitt Romney Says He’ll Take Credit For Saving The Auto Industry (VIDEO)
Mitt Romney continues to take credit for things that he had absolutely nothing to do with. Not long after his advisor Eric Ferhnstrom said that the auto bailout was Romney’s idea, Romney himself is now saying the exact same thing.
During an interview on WEWS-TV in Cleveland on Monday, Romney said that the auto industry bailout that he has been slamming as a horrible idea these past four years is something he deserves credit for.
”My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy. That was the right course I argued for from the very beginning. It was the UAW and the president that delayed the idea of bankruptcy. 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. So I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back.”
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Here’s the video:
Throughout the last four years and throughout the Republican Presidential primary debates, Romney has been highly critical of the auto bailout and has been especially critical of how President Obama has handled it.
After President Obama won the 2008 Election, Romney wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in which he called for letting Detroit go bankrupt and that if government money was used to help the industry we “can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” This call by Romney has drawn fire from industry experts, economists, and even fellow Republicans because such a plan would have deepened the Great Recession into something more like a Great Depression. The American auto industry would have disappeared along with the millions of jobs connected to it.
In February of this year, even as the American auto industry was back to being number one in the world, Romney wrote yet another op-ed attacking the bailout and President Obama’s handling of it.
Now that the American auto industry is now a complete and utter success because of the bailout, Mitt Romney says he should get the credit for saving it. The guy who would have let the American auto industry die is now claiming that saving it was all his doing. It’s a complete flip flop from what Romney has been saying these last four years. You can bet that had the bailout failed, Romney would certainly not be taking credit, but he wants to jump on the victory train and claim credit now that it’s a success that makes his earlier criticism and opposition look foolish. Had we listened to Mitt Romney’s advice to hope for the private sector to save the auto industry, the economy would be a disaster today. We wouldn’t have the 26 consecutive months of job growth and we’d be talking about an unemployment rate well over 10%. The manufacturing sector would be extinct on American soil. That was Mitt Romney’s plan that he called for in his 2008 op-ed. Mitt Romney is trying to paint himself as some kind of economic genius who can magically make the economy better. But he’s not the economic guru he would have us all believe. One thing Mitt Romney is good at is destroying companies. When Mitt Romney founded Bain Capital, he created a company designed to fire people, ship jobs overseas, and close down whole companies. He gutted businesses, sold them at huge profits, and laughed all the way to the bank while the businesses died. Romney’s economic model is vulture capitalism and perhaps nobody has hammered Mitt Romney for his economic model than Newt Gingrich in a SuperPAC ad detailing Romney’s destructive business plan.
The fact that under a President Romney the American auto industry would have been allowed to die off should disgust every American who cares about jobs and the economy. Mitt Romney wants us all to believe that he saved the industry when it was in fact Romney who called for letting it fail. This is a man who hasn’t even been in a government position since 2006. He had no part of the decision to save the industry. The fact is, President Obama signed a majority of the auto bailout loans and is the one who masterfully guided the American auto industry into a position of strength and viability. And he did all of this while Mitt Romney was busy whining about it.
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3:51 pm
Wake me when he takes credit for putting duct tape on space missions.