Romney-Santorum Ad Wars Intensify in Michigan
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
February 14, 2012
nytimes.com
Rick Santorum on Wednesday responded to attacks in Michigan from allies of Mitt Romney by unveiling a humorous television ad that portrays Mr. Romney as a Rambo-style commando wielding an automatic weapon that shoots splatters of mud at his opponents.
The ad is Mr. Santorum’s first serious attempt to deflect what aides anticipate will be a barrage of negative attacks during the next two weeks as Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney campaign in Michigan ahead of the state’s Feb. 28 primary.
Those attacks began late on Tuesday when a “Super PAC” backing Mr. Romney released an ad alleging big government spending by Mr. Santorum while he served as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. Restore Our Future, the group behind the ad, has said it will spend at least $460,000 in Michigan during the next two weeks.
Mr. Santorum’s campaign has struggled to raise the millions of dollars he needs to compete with Mr. Romney and his allies. And it is unclear how much money he is spending to counter the super PAC attacks. But Mr. Santorum is clearly hoping to generate buzz — and free publicity — with the humorous new ad, titled “Rombo.”
In it, a Romney look-alike is shown trying to shoot mud at cardboard cutouts of Rick Santorum as an announcer says that “Mitt Romney’s negative attack machine is back, on full throttle.”
The ad complains that “Romney and his super PAC have spent a staggering $20 million brutally attacking fellow Republicans” and hammers Mr. Romney for “trying to hide from his big government Romneycare and his support for job killing cap-and-trade.” It ends with the Romney character being splattered with mud himself and the announcer saying: “in the end, Mitt Romney’s ugly attacks are going to backfire.”
The political air wars over Michigan have begun in earnest as four national polls this week — including one by The New York Times — shows Mr. Santorum surging from the bottom of the pack of Republican candidates into a virtual tie with Mr. Romney.
Mr. Romney on Tuesday moved to shore up support in his boyhood home of Michigan with a positive commercial about his ties to the star and an opinion article defending his 2008 position to let the auto industry go bankrupt.
Mr. Romney’s new advertisement, called “Growing Up,” shows him driving a car and reminiscing about life in Detroit. He criticizes President Obama and concludes by saying: “I want to make Michigan stronger and better. Michigan’s been my home, and this is personal.”
The commercial is to begin running on Wednesday, according to a Republican who tracks media spending and who said the advertising cost a modest $178,000 on the NBC station in Detroit.
Mr. Romney also sought to highlight his connections to Michigan in the opinion article published in The Detroit News on Tuesday, while also deflecting potential criticism about his opposition to federal loans to rescue the auto industry.
Noting that he was born in Detroit and that his father was president of the American Motors car company in the 1950s, Mr. Romney wrote that he was 7 years old when he got his “love of cars and chrome and fins and roaring motors” from his father.
But the main message of the piece was to defend an Op-Ed article Mr. Romney wrote just two weeks after the nation chose Barack Obama as president in 2008. Published in The New York Times, it had the simple headline “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”
Mr. Romney’s explanation is a complicated one, especially given the industry’s remarkable turnaround in the last three years.
Mr. Romney says he always favored what he calls a “managed bankruptcy” for the auto companies that would have allowed the businesses to restructure and emerge stronger than before. He criticized Mr. Obama for choosing what he called a “bailout” of the industry that benefited big labor unions.
But Mr. Romney next acknowledges that General Motors and Chrysler did in fact go through a “managed bankruptcy” at the urging of Mr. Obama’s administration — and he takes credit for being the one to have the idea first.
“Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation,” Mr. Romney wrote in the piece. “The course I recommended was eventually followed.”
Officials in Mr. Obama’s administration, and many economists in both parties, scoff at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that a managed bankruptcy was possible without the billions of dollars in government aid to the car companies. They say Wall Street and private equity firms in early 2009 were in no position to lend the kind of money that the companies needed to manage the bankruptcy process in an orderly fashion.
They also point out a fact that Mr. Romney neglects to mention in Tuesday’s opinion article: that it was the Bush administration that made the initial loans to General Motors and Chrysler, starting the “bailouts” that Mr. Romney derides.
In a conference call with reporters on Tuesday, Jennifer M. Granholm, a former Democratic governor of Michigan, accused Mr. Romney of “stabbing us in the back” despite being from Michigan.
“I think he should say: ‘I’m sorry. The president was right,’ ” Ms. Granholm said. “Instead, he is justifying what he said, which turned out to be a terribly wrong piece of advice.”
Democrats also accuse Mr. Romney of trying to rewrite the history of his earlier positions.
In the first paragraph of his 2008 opinion article, Mr. Romney made an unmistakable prediction: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”
In fact, General Motors announced last month that it had earned $8 billion in profits in 2011. Chrysler this month reported a profit of $225 million for the fourth quarter of 2011.
Mr. Romney now argues that the auto industry would be even better off if it had not received government money. And he accuses Mr. Obama of “crony capitalism” because the Chrysler bailout included provisions that gave the United Auto Workers an ownership stake in the company after it emerged from bankruptcy.
Mr. Romney called that an “$85 billion sweetheart deal disguised as a rescue plan” and argued that it was to benefit the unions, which were the president’s political supporters. He wrote that the federal government should “divest itself” of its remaining ownership position in General Motors and should turn the proceeds “over to the nation’s taxpayers.”
In fact, the restructuring of Chrysler during the bankruptcy process did involve agreements with the United Automobile Workers and the administration that led to a much smaller union, plant closings and a two-tier wage system that has helped to trim costs. The company also trimmed health care costs that had long been called an impediment to profitability.
Officials for Mr. Obama’s administration have long argued that such concessions from the unions were possible only because of the leverage the government wielded through the bailout and bankruptcy process.
Bill Vlasic contributed reporting from Detroit, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.
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