Replies to post #190880 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[BOREALIS]

The Morning Plum: Romney’s Jeep-to-China lie earns brutal headlines in Ohio

Posted at 09:05 AM ET, 10/30/2012
By Greg Sargent

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-romneys-jeep-to-china-lie-earns-brutal-headlines-in-ohio/2012/10/30/6ca63574-227e-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html
(with tons of imbedded links)

As David Plouffe wrote in his memoir of Campaign 2008, the Obama team has long thought that one of the most effective ways to influence independents and undecided voters is via local media in key battleground states. So it’s worth taking a look at how the battle over Mitt Romney’s latest falsehood — that the auto bailout will result in American Jeep jobs getting shipped to China — is playing in the Ohio media, since this claim represents Romney’s last chance to turn things around in the state.

Here’s the headline in today’s Toledo Blade:

Clinton, Biden call Jeep ad deceptive

Another in the Toledo Blade:

Obama campaign accuses Romney of dishonesty on Jeep issue

The Blade has been covering this story pretty aggressively, noting that Romney — who now claims Obama followed his approach on the auto-bailout — previously derided the rescue effort as “crony capitalism.”

The Cleveland Plain Dealer, meanwhile, published a scorching editorial with this headline:

Flailing in Ohio, Romney rolls out Jeep ploy

The editorial flatly noted that Romney is now trying to sow “confusion” among Ohioans, to obscure his opposition to a policy that has helped save an industry linked to one in eight Ohio jobs. “It won’t work,” it concluded. “Ohio voters know who stepped up when the auto industry was at the abyss — and it wasn’t Romney.”

And the Columbus Dispatch has been running with headlines like: “Jeep/Romney question lingers.” The Dispatch extensively fact-checked Romney’s claims about the auto-bailout, clearly demonstrating that he did in fact oppose the rescue of the industry Obama ended up pursuing.

This is hardly a comprehensive look at the local coverage, but it does suggest the possibility that Romney’s Jeep-to-China gamble may be backfiring. Polls have shown that large numbers of Ohioans don’t think Romney cares about their needs and problems. And the Obama campaign views the auto bailout, and Romney’s dishonesty about it, as central to their closing case against Romney’s character, integrity, and true priorities. So these are exactly the headlines the Obama team wants.

* Romney’s Jeep-to-China lie scared workers: Check out this nugget in the New York Times overview of the escalating battle over Romney’s falsehood:

Bruce Baumhower, the president of the United Auto Workers local that oversees the major Jeep plant here, said Mr. Romney’s initial comments on moving production to China drew a rash of calls from members concerned about their jobs. When he informed them Chrysler was, in fact, is expanding its Jeep operation here, he said in an interview, “The response has been, ‘That’s pretty pitiful.’ ”

Amazing. It isn’t just that Romney is willing to lie brazenly to the people whose votes he wants; he’s also willing to play directly on their fears for their livelihoods.

* Romney’s auto-bailout ad takes a beating: Glenn Kessler thoroughly dismantles Romney’s new ad claiming the auto-bailout will result in American Jeep jobs getting shipped to China. A Romney spokesperson defended the assertion this way:

“The larger point that the governor made is that rather than creating jobs here, the foreign owner, handpicked by President Obama, is planning to add jobs overseas.”

Just wow. As Kessler notes, production is being planned in China to serve the Chinese market. And not only that, Chrysler is in fact adding Jeep production in the U.S.

* Yes, Florida is still very close: Nate Cohn takes a look at another basic fact that has gone overlooked amid the obsessing over Ohio: Florida remains very close, and Obama could still very well win there, thanks partly to the state’s growing black and non-Cuban Hispanic populations. Voter registration numbers show large jumps among them.

A new CNN poll finds Romney only leading Obama by 50-49 among likely Florida voters. And the polling averages suggest the race remains tighter in Florida (and, by the way, in Virginia) than it does in Ohio. Romney probably needs all three to win.

* Another national poll finds a dead heat: A new NPR poll finds Romney leading Obama nationally among likely voters by one point, 48-47. That’s consistent with averages showing the race within a point.

In the NPR poll. Obama holds a four point lead among the sub-sample of voters from 12 key swing states, 50-46. Exercise caution about swing-state sub-samples; state polling averages are far better. But in these, too, Obama holds a small but meaningful edge in the electoral college.

* Romney holds turnout edge: Steven Shepard digs into the new Pew poll and finds pretty clear evidence that Romney voters are more enthusiastic about the election and more likely to vote. It’s a reminder of how much pressure there is on Obama’s massive grassroots turnout operation — which the Obama team has literally spent years building for this one moment — to match or exceed expectations.

* Romney on disaster response: The Times editorial board makes it plain: Yes, Romney did say he favors transferring disaster response to the states, and even suggested privatizing it.

The Times notes the longtime GOP resistance to federal emergency planning, and adds: “ideology still blinds Republicans to its value. Many don’t like the idea of free aid for poor people, or they think people should pay for their bad decisions, which this week includes living on the East Coast.”

* And Chris Christie praises Obama response to Sandy: Nice catch by Steve Benen: Chris Christie’s praise for Obama’s handling of Hurricane Sandy was surprisingly effusive this morning. It’s unlikely that the storm will have much of an impact on the election. But as Jonathan Bernstein notes, it’s not impossible that if the federal response and Obama looks particularly good (or bad), it could impact remaining undecided voters on the margins.

What else?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/the-morning-plum-romneys-jeep-to-china-lie-earns-brutal-headlines-in-ohio/2012/10/30/6ca63574-227e-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html

[BOREALIS]

Yes, Romney's a Liar, but This Is Getting Ridiculous

John Nichols on October 30, 2012 - 2:33 PM ET

It is no secret that political candidates are capable of doing awful things when they are reach the desperate final days of an election campaign.

But trying to scare American workers into believing that a government initiative that saved their industry was some sort of secret scheme to shutter major plants and offshore jobs is more than just creepy. It’s economic fear-mongering of a sort that is destructive to the spirit of communities and to the very future of the republic as an industrial force.

George Romney, who led the remarkable American Motors Company project that would eventually produce the Jeep, never in a political career that saw him win election as governor of Michigan and seek the Republican nomination for president would have engaged in such calumny.

But George Romney’s ne’re-do-well son, a very different sort of businessman who devoted his career to taking apart American companies and offshoring jobs, is trying to resurrect his presidential candidacy with a big lie.

And the lie is about Jeeps.

Jeeps are made in Toledo, Ohio, where the iconic American vehicle has been produced since 1941, and Romney needs to win Toledo and the rest of northwest Ohio if he is to stand a chance of winning the battleground state that is key to the presidency.

Last week, Romney went to the region and shocked voters by suggesting that: “I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”

The story, an October 22 report by Bloomberg News, which specifically stated that: “Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. [Fiat/Chrysler executive Mike] Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.”

Yet, Romney spoke of the company that manufactures Jeeps “moving all production to China.

The statement stirred fundamental fears in a regional that has been battered by plant closings. So much so that Jeep’s parent company, Chrysler, rushed to clarify that Romney was completely, totally, incredibly wrong. “Let’s set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China,” announced Chrysler.

Company spokesman Gaulberto Ranieri said that Romney had remade the facts so aggressively that: “It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats.”

What was Romney’s response to being caught in a lie.

He lied bigger.

Much bigger.

The Romney campaign is now airing an ad in Ohio that claims President Obama, with the auto bailout that saved domestic vehicle production, “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.”

The ad concludes that Romney—whose Bain Capital enterprise identified as “a pioneer of outsourcing”—“will fight for every American job.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the nation’s top experts on political advertising reviewed the ad and dismissed it as “inferentially false.”

“They are inviting a false inference,” Hall said of the Romney campaign’s attempt to suggest that Obama had engineered a change in Jeep’s status that would see the Toledo plant shuttered and its more than 3,500 workers idled.

The Washington Post “Fact Checker” site reviewed Romney’s ad and declared: “the overall message of the ad is clearly misleading—especially since it appears to have been designed to piggyback off of Romney’s gross misstatement that Chrysler was moving Ohio factory jobs to China.”

The pushback from Obama’s backers and his campaign has been aggressive.

Former President Bill Clinton flew to Ohio and decried Romney’s claim as “the biggest load of bull in the world.”

Vice President Joe Biden said: “I have never seen anything like that. It’s an absolutely, patently false assertion. It’s such an outrageous assertion that, one of the few times in my memory, a major American corporation, Chrysler, has felt obliged to go public and say, there is no truth.”

An Obama campaign ad announced that “now, after Romney’s false claim of Jeep outsourcing to China, Chrysler itself has refuted Romney’s lie.”

What was Romney’s response.

Up the ad buy.

Expand the big lie so that it is now enormous.

The deception has become such a serious issue that, on Tuesday, Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne felt compelled to clarify what is becoming an international controversy.

“Chrysler Group’s production plans for the Jeep brand have become the focus of public debate. I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China,” wrote Marchionne, who added:

North American production is critical to achieving our goal of selling 800,000 Jeep vehicles by 2014. In fact, U.S. production of our Jeep models has nearly tripled (it is expected to be up 185 percent) since 2009 in order to keep up with global demand…

With the increase in demand for our vehicles, especially Jeep branded vehicles, we have added more than 11,200 U.S. jobs since 2009. Plants producing Jeep branded vehicles alone have seen the number of people invested in the success of the Jeep brand grow to more than 9,300 hourly jobs from 4,700. This will increase by an additional 1,100 as the Liberty successor, which will be produced in Toledo, is introduced for global distribution in the second quarter of 2013.

There was nothing unambiguous about that statement. Yet Marchionne continued: “Jeep is one of our truly global brands with uniquely American roots. This will never change. So much so that we committed that the iconic Wrangler nameplate, currently produced in our Toledo, Ohio, plant, will never see full production outside the United States.”

“Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand,” confirmed Marchionne. “It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.”

That’s a rare commitment by a manufacturer—far more clear and unequivocal than the commitment Bain Capital made to the companies it bought up, tore apart and outsourced.

Yet, Mitt Romney’s campaign is still running the ad.

Still lying.

That’s made United Auto Workers union president Bob King furious:
[ http://www.uaw.org/articles/uaw-romney-doubles-down-jeep-lie ]

It is especially hypocritical of Mr. Romney’s statements and new ad is Bain Capital’s closing of profitable U.S. facilities and shifting work to China to make even higher profits like what is happening today in closing a profitable Sensata plant in Freeport, IL, to move the work to China. Romney says in the ad that he will fight for every American job, so why isn’t he fighting for the American jobs at Sensata? And why isn’t he intervening with his own Bain Capital to keep these jobs in the U.S. rather than outsourcing them to China? We just wish that Mr. Romney was as committed to investing in the U.S. as Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne is.

Americans will remember that President Obama stood behind American working families and American communities in rescuing the U.S. auto industry and that Mr. Romney opposed the rescue and now attacks Chrysler with misinformation. In putting out this misinformation, Romney is recklessly undermining Chrysler’s reputation and threatening good American jobs.

Imagine if Mitt Romney were to be elected president of the United States.

Imagine if he had to go into negotiations with Marchionne, or another CEO of another industrial giant, about protecting US jobs. Or expanding US manufacturing.

Would the executive trust Romney?

Or would the executive remember Romney as the politician who lied and then lied bigger in order to get what he wanted?

That’s a question that American voters who want their country to have a future as a country that makes cars and trucks and Jeeps would be wise to ponder as November 6 approaches.

For more on Mitt “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” Romney’s auto industry problems, check out John Nichols on “Obama Outsources Romney.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/170621/obama-outsources-romney

http://www.thenation.com/blog/170905/yes-romneys-liar-getting-ridiculous#