Take away Mitt’s script, and he’ll continue to step in it, time after time, again and again.
I had hoped to write about some other issues beside the Republican primaries, but Willard “Mitt” Romney just won’t let me...
Yes, he did it again. We all know that Willard was born into wealth, and due to his corporate wrecking company, Bain Capital, he has grown that wealth to even more hundreds of millions of dollars. No, I am not jealous about his wealth, but as tight as the race in Michigan has become with Rick Santorum, (a race that should have been Mitt’s with little or no effort), he just can’t seem to keep it together without mentioning that he’s a very rich man. (Brings back the time when John McCain couldn’t remember how many homes he had.)
Yep, he blew it again at the Detroit Economic Club as he stated, “I love this country. I actually love this state. This feels good being back in Michigan. Um, you know the trees are the right height. The, uh, the streets are just right. I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillac’s, actually.”
Really, two Cadillac’s?
And he says this in Detroit, a city which has the highest poverty rate of any big city in America.
This is a city that is so poor that it has lost one-half of its city bus system over the past 5 years.
And to top it all off, the tax plan that Mitt Romney presented at the Detroit Economic club will have the following effect on most of the people living in this big automotive manufacturing city.
Mr. David Cay Johnston of Reuters pointed out last week in his article that Romney’s plan would: “Raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college. Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.”
Romney’s tax-cut plan, according to models prepared by the independent Tax Policy Center, would heavily weight the tax benefits toward the top of the income earning spectrum, not to the large groups of average American citizens currently living in Detroit and other Michigan auto manufacturing cities.
And of course, this so called “plan” is being offered to the people of this once great city after Mitt Romney had said in the now-famous New York Times Op-Ed article against the government auto bailouts, saying: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.”
This amazing Romney faux-pas was totally smacked down by Mr. Steven Rattner, the lead adviser on the current administration’s auto task force in 2009. In a later New York Times Op-Ed article, after GM had once again become the #1 automobile manufacturer, Mr. Rattner nailed Mr. Romney for suggesting that the government “should have stayed on the sidelines” and allowed the companies to go through “ ‘managed bankruptcies’ financed by private capital.” As Rattner put it: “That sounds like a wonderfully sensible approach — except that it’s utter fantasy. In late 2008 and early 2009, when GM and Chrysler had exhausted their liquidity, every scrap of private capital had fled to the sidelines. I know this because the administration’s auto task force, for which I was the lead adviser, spoke diligently to all conceivable providers of funds, and not one had the slightest interest in financing those companies on any terms. If Mr. Romney disagrees, he should come forward with specific names of willing investors in place of empty rhetoric. I predict that he won’t be able to, because there aren’t any.”
Mitt’s “multiple Cadillac moment” also occurred the day after the Pew Research Center found that 63% of all Americans now support the auto bailouts, with 56% saying “the loans the government made to GM and Chrysler were mostly good for the economy.”
To put this all into perspective, even the city’s largest newspaper, The Detroit News, has a problem with the man whose father was a beloved Michigan governor and the state where Mitt was born and raised. “We disagree with Romney on a point vital to Michigan — his opposition to the bailout of the domestic automobile industry. Romney advocated for a more traditional bankruptcy process, while we believe the bridge loans provided by the federal government in the fall of 2008 were absolutely essential to the survival of General Motors Corp. and Chrysler Corp. The issue isn’t a differentiator in the G.O.P. primary, since the entire [candidate] field opposed the rescue effort.”
The Detroit Free Press’s back-handed “endorsement” also complained about Romney’s opposition on the bailouts. They called him “dead wrong” and said that in the past year he has been “...refashioning himself as something other than what his record suggests. He has made gestures toward economic and social radicalism, and eschewed the common sense of cooperative governing that made him a success in Massachusetts.”
But with all this “stepping on his tongue” activity in Michigan, it also appears that he does spread it around in other states that are also having primaries. Here is another goodie of an endorsement from the Arizona Republic newspaper.
“There are better orators in American politics. Indeed, the Democrats appear to have one. And certainly there are Republicans who better project the passion for the office they seek. Steady, unflappable Romney would not a ‘passion president’ make.”
And this head-scratching item was offered as an ”endorsement”of Mr. Romney...?
Copyright G.Ater 2012
Follow me on Twitter: gater01
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