Mitt Romney gets blown out at Ford Field

By Michael J.W. Stickings

"Mitt Romney's Ford Field Fumble?" asks ABC News.

It's a rhetorical question. Of course he fumbled. And what an embarrassing fumble it was:

Standing on the 30-yard line of Detroit's Ford Field, Mitt Romney delivered what was billed as a major economic speech before a crowd of about 1,200 supporters on Friday.

In his crucial home state of Michigan,  Romney reiterated his new tax plan to applause from an audience dwarfed by the scope of the stadium that seats up to 80,000 spectators.

The Romney campaign promised an economic policy speech on filled with major new policy initiatives, but as it turned out, the venue may have been too big for his message. The supporters, sitting in folding chairs on the field of the indoor football stadium that is home to the NFL's Detroit Lions, were surrounded by tens of thousands of empty seats.

"I want to thank the folks at the Ford Field for making this space available for us," Romney said. "I guess we had a hard time finding a large enough place to meet and this certainly is."

The speech itself was typical Romney. If you've been paying attention, you've heard it all before. He said that Detroit should be "the motor city of the world," though of course he was against the auto bailout -- which has proven to be a huge success.

As The Hill notes:

Television cameras showed rows of empty chairs as Romney rehashed many of the policies and quips he'd used in previous speeches, made a few jokes that appeared to fall flat with the audience and said that his wife, Ann, drives "a couple of Cadillacs," which will likely give Democrats more ammunition for their depiction of him as rich and out of touch.

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Most of Romney's speech was focused on rehashing the tax policies he'd released earlier this week, and repeating attacks he’d made previously on President Obama. Romney promised to lower taxes and repeal Obama’s healthcare overhaul, comments he makes during nearly all of his speeches.

And those in attendance were not terribly impressed, it would seem:

After an audience member asked Romney if he thought he'd have the best chance to beat Obama, Romney dismissed the other GOP candidates.

"I not only think I have the best chance, I think I have the only chance — maybe I'm overstating it a bit," he said, chuckling awkwardly.

"That's my family leading the applause," he said quickly, although no one was clapping, then laughed again. No one appeared to laugh with him.

Awk... ward. And this from the Republican frontrunner and likely nominee? Yes. And this is what it's come to: Romney bullshitting, the media calling him on his bullshit, and whatever appeal he has left draining away. It's like no one's even taking him seriously anymore as he runs as far as he can to the right while keeping an eye on the center he must head to should he win the nomination, promoting a far-right agenda on everything from the economy to immigration to same-sex marriage to unions to Iran, but doing so without even a shred of credibility, so obvious does it seem that he'll do and say anything for votes, and blaming Obama for everything under the sun, so much so that it's all become quite ridiculous, his act so laughable, his inability to connect so blatant, his desperation so palpable that the negative media narrative is writing itself, and deepening, every time he opens his mouth or even just appears in public.

Even his key surrogates, the Chris Christies and Ann Coulters of the world, must find it hard to summon any enthusiasm. Imagine how the party faithful will react when he walks out to give his acceptance speech at the convention later this year. They'll back him because he's the Republican and because they hate the president, but will there be any genuine love for Romney himself?

A speech full of the usual banality to some unimpressed supporters in the middle of a mostly empty stadium in a state that he calls his own pretty much says it all.

Behind the Ad: Romney strongly (and wrongly) suggests Obama caused the auto sector crisis

By Richard K. Barry

(Another installment in our "Behind the Ad" series.)

Who: Mitt Romney in an ad called "Growing Up."

Where: Michigan.

What's going on: In the ad, Romney is driving around in a car on a street somewhere in Michigan. He is narrating himself as various scenes are shown depicting the Detroit auto show, workers at a Chrysler plant, and the General Motors tower in downtown Detroit.

The Washington Post provides this analysis, which is bang on:

Mitt Romney clearly wants to remind Michigan voters that he grew up there and his ad, the first one designed for the state's Feb. 28 primary, is an explicit home-town appeal. He reminisces about his father, a popular former governor and auto executive, name-checks the renowned auto show and uses imagery designed to remind voters of the Motor City's glory days. If that's not enough, he concludes by asserting that the state's fate is "personal" for him.

The ad comes at a delicate time for Romney. While he recovered somewhat by winning Maine's caucuses last weekend, he's still nursing wounds from Rick Santorum's sweep of nominating caucuses in Colorado and Minnesota, and Missouri's non-binding primary. Santorum's momentum has pushed him ahead of Romney in a handful of national polls and in early Michigan surveys. If Romney is to regain momentum before the potentially decisive Super Tuesday primaries on March 6, when 10 states vote, he badly needs to win in Michigan.

But the part about the ad that really stinks is the strong suggestion that President Obama is somehow to blame for Detroit's woes.

Again, The Washington Post:

He also implies that Obama's policies played a role in the auto industry's collapse, which is not the case. After noting the industry's decline in one breath, Romney then says Obama "did all these things that liberals have wanted to do for years." Regardless of the merits of Obama's policies, they didn't bring about Detroit's ills. The auto industry in general, and Chrysler and General Motors in particular, were collapsing before Obama took office in 2009. The decision to continue the bailout of GM and Chrysler, which Romney doesn't mention, was one of Obama's first major decisions in office. Romney publicly opposed the bailouts and reaffirmed his stance this week in an opinion piece published in The Detroit News.

I don't know if I should give the ad grudging respect for creating a grossly false impression without actually lying or if I should be disgusted by yet another example of bullshit coming out of Romney's mouth to support his run for the GOP nomination.

Well, actually, I do do know. This is pathetic.

Hard to believe that anyone could actually lower the level of political discourse coming from the right, but Mitt Romney has.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Romney slams auto bailout, adopts political suicide strategy in Michigan

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Mitt Romney was wrong about the bailout of the auto industry -- he was against it, and therefore in favor of the industry collapsing, and it's been a rousing success -- and yet continues to be riding the wave of his own failure.

In an op-ed in yesterday's Detroit Newt, Romney argues that the bailout was a bad idea, notes reluctantly that there has been some "indisputable good news" (i.e., GM and Chrysler still in business -- he doesn't mention all the jobs that would have been lost, all the lives ruined, all the families destroyed), and then shifts course and blames President Obama for mismanaging the bailout, apparently because criticizing the bailout itself is now ridiculous.

And for what specifically does he blame Obama. Well, it should come as no surprise that Romney plays the ever-popular-in-GOP-circles union-bashing card and blames him for not "standing up to union bosses," specifically Democratic and pro-Obama union bosses. And also for giving "American taxpayers," through the Treasury Department, a share of GM:

This was crony capitalism on a grand scale. 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.

Instead of a bailout, Romney preferred "managed bankruptcy." In other words -- surprise, surprise -- he wanted the banks to win, not the union -- not, that is, the workers.

By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.

Thus, the outcome of the managed bankruptcy proceedings was dictated by the terms of the bailout. Chrysler's "secured creditors," who in the normal course of affairs should have been first in line for compensation, were given short shrift, while at the same time, the UAWs' union-boss-controlled trust fund received a 55 percent stake in the firm.

Confused? (Sure, it's complicated.) I'll let emptywheel's Marcy Wheeler explain:

He's complaining, of course, that VEBA (the trust fund run by professionals that allowed the auto companies to spin off contractual obligations – retiree healthcare – to the unions) got a stake in Chrysler while Chrysler's secured creditors took a haircut.

So, in part, he's basically complaining that the bailout preserved the healthcare a bunch of 55+ year old blue collar workers were promised. He’s pissed they got to keep their healthcare.

He's also complaining that banks took a haircut, as would happen in any managed bankruptcy.

But it's more than that. He's complaining that a bunch of banks that themselves had been bailed out had to take a haircut. He's complaining, for example, that JP Morgan Chase, Chrysler’s largest creditor at the time and the recipient, itself, of $68.6B in bailout loans, had to take a haircut on $2B in loans to Chrysler.

When Romney says he wants the free market to do what it does best, he must be referring to the sort of vulture capitalism over which he presided at Bain Capital, the sort of capitalism that rewards banks and investment firms will billions upon billions in profit with no regard for the human toll of their actions.

As Travis Waldron writes at ThinkProgress:

In the editorial, Romney, whose former company profited from a government bailout, called on the government to sell its shares in GM and return the profits to taxpayers. In other words, Romney is fine with destroying the company when it isn’t succeeding, but then wants to seize its profits if it turns around.

Meanwhile, he continues to ignore the success of the rescue plan he criticizes. Chrysler posted its first profit more than a decade in last year and expects those profits to continue growing in 2012. It has added 9,400 jobs since its rescue and plans to add 1,600 more at a plant in Illinois this year, and the success of Chrysler and General Motors has helped American automakers control more than half of the industry's market share. The industry has hired enough workers to make up for all those laid off during the recession, and American and foreign automakers plan to add 167,000 jobs at American plants this year.

Now, the demerits (and privileged rich douchebaggery) of his argument aside, what of the politics of his positioning? Surely this will kill him in Michigan, where he's currently trailing Rick Santorum, no? Er, no. As David Dayen notes at Firedoglake, "This isn't quite as suicidal as it looks. Romney needs to win Michigan, and Michigan Republicans actually don't support the auto rescue, in true what's-the-matter-with-Kansas fashion. So though this looks like the opposite of pandering, that's what it is, playing to the conservative lizard brain conception of greedy unions." Mistermix makes the same point at Balloon Juice:

We all know that Santorum is toxic as a national candidate, but the problem for Romney is the only way to beat Santorum is to adopt the same anti-gay, anti-woman and anti-progress positions in the primaries and bet that he can somehow reverse course this Fall. The longer the contest draws out, the more Romney has to pander, and the more he turns himself into the Goldwater-like candidate that the Republican establishment is desperate to avoid. There are two more debates before Super Tuesday and Mitt's going to have to be pretty fucking severe if he hopes to keep up with the new front-runner.

But of course it is suicidal in the long run, assuming he wins the nomination and finds himself up against Obama for real. Dayen again:

For the state as a whole, however, it's a really dumb double-down, especially when it can be so easily characterized as Romney favoring banks over people's health care. Not to mention the fact that Michigan's unemployment rate has fallen precipitously, led by manufacturing. Romney's lament about managed bankruptcies and union trust funds sounds like a fan whose football team has won 35 games in a row complaining about the new trim on the uniforms.

Well, it sounds much worse than that. It sounds like a privileged rich douchebag with a plutocratic sense of entitlement (as I've been writing for some time now) who got it terribly wrong but who is lashing out at Obama, advocating for the interests of the super-rich at the expense of everyone else (and at the expense of the economy, which he needs to be in bad shape to have any hope of winning in November), steadfastly refusing to acknowledge his own errors, and shamelessly pandering to the extremist base of his party.

Basically, what else is new?

The problem, for him, is that in doing and saying whatever it takes to win the Republican nomination, now more of a challenge with Santorum posing such a serious threat, he's effectively destroying whatever hope he has of winning in November. And the longer this remains a tight race, the longer Santorum keeps up the fight, the worse it will be for him.

Survival now, suicide later. Or, rather, survival through suicide. Isn't it ironic?

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For more on all Romney's attack on the auto bailout, see Steve Benen at his new home at The Maddow Blog, where he posts this clip from last summer -- Romney being so very, very wrong, and certainly not someone who should be trusted with the presidency: