Is it traditional for presidential candidates to take responsibility for the accomplishments of the incumbent?
Despite his 2008 call to “let Detroit go bankrupt,” presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said Monday that he would “take a lot of credit” for his impact on the U.S. automobile industry’s comeback.
During an interview with WEWS-TV in Cleveland following a campaign stop, Romney said his views helped save the industry.
Technically, the auto manufacturers did enter a managed bankruptcy, but they also (for the most part) received government bailouts, which Romney was against. (He said the bailout money would “seal their fate,” and that you could “kiss the American automotive industry goodbye” if they received bailouts.) So Romney can play the game of dancing around these technicalities to seize some form of the truth, but blue collar voters aren’t going to buy it; Romney has been way down in Ohio since head-to-head polling started.
Isn’t that kinda how Charlie Hales saved Portland Public Schools?
“Managed bankruptcy” just means the company gets reorganized, slimmed down, whatever, by an outside party. The issue is that a company needs financing (huge loans) to operate during a bankruptcy: otherwise, they would miss payments to workers and suppliers, and they would never be able to emerge from that hole. Romney said they should have gone into a regular, private bankruptcy overseen by a judge, without the need for legislation, but that was impossible, because there was a banking crisis going on at the time (you might have heard about it). The only possible lender was the government. Romney opposed the only actually practicable way for the bankruptcy to proceed.
To the flock of usual “witty” Mercury commenters, add one more: our lame duck City Commissioner. Slow day at City Hall?
@3 No one reads BlueOregon anymore so he’s grazing greener pastures.