Mitt Romney Tells Detroit to Drop Dead
In an op-ed in today’s Detroit News, Mitt Romney attempts to restate and reconfigure his argument against the government’s intervention in the U.S. auto industry. He places that intervention squarely on the shoulders of the Obama administration, terming it “crony capitalism on a grand scale.”
There’s a lot of political strategy at work here. In the first place, this is Romney’s attempt at saying something positive about his candidacy — a must, considering he’ll spend most of his money in Michigan trying to tear down Rick Santorum. He’s also working to get out from under a previous op-ed on the matter, written back in November of 2008, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” (That headline was written by The New York Times, not Romney, but it’s been an albatross around his neck ever since.)
To that end, Mitt Romney takes a stab at positioning himself as a “Son of Detroit,” and a critic of the overall intervention. But his identification with Detroiters is pretty awkward, and his problem with how the intervention was handled really boils down to his preference for moneyed elites over Detroit’s auto workers.