Is the auto bailout a key, character issue between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney?

While some political pundits say the auto bailout has run its course as an issue in the presidential campaign, more information continues surfacing to cement the idea that Mitt Romney has flip-flopped repeatedly on the remedy for the car industry.

News reports from 2008 by the Associated Press, NBC News and CBS News show that Romney strongly opposed giving the bridge loans to General Motors and Chrysler and instead wanted to push them into bankruptcy.

Romney now talks as if he favored federal loan guarantees for the automakers at the time, but the Associated Press headlined a Nov. 20, 2008 article: "Romney adamantly against auto industry bailout." And Romney told CBS: "There's no question but that if you just write a check that you're going to see these companies go out of business ultimately."

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic argues that the auto bailout is not only relevant right up to Election Day, it may be the most telling issue of the entire campaign.

At its most basic, Cohn wrote, it shows Obama’s willingness to rely upon government intervention while Romney believes the investment banks would have saved pieces of GM and Chrysler.

But Cohn believes there is more to it:

“… The Detroit rescue reveals another difference between the two -- one that is more about character than ideology. In 2009, you didn't need a crystal ball to see that Michigan, Ohio, and the rest of the midwest would be important parts of the 2012 election. But rescuing the companies would entail its own risks. The public by that point was tired of bailouts and, according to polls, they didn’t find the autoworkers a whole lot more sympathetic than the bankers. Conditioned by years of anti-union propaganda and stories (or personal experiences) with substandard American cars, the American public had come to see employees of the Big Three as pampered, slothful, and undeserving of help. Even in the Midwest, where the effects of a shutdown would be most acute, the rescue elicited mixed responses.

“Obama understood this. Even if the rescue worked as he hoped it would, chances were good that progress would be slow in coming -- that, by today, the companies would still be struggling, creating a political embarrassment. Obama approved the rescue anyway. And that included granting assistance to Chrysler. Half of his economic advisers opposed that, fearing, among other things, the shrinking car market was too small to support both companies. Obama’s rationale was simple: If he had the power to stop the devastation of either company shutting down, he was going to use it.

“Romney’s inconsistent rhetoric may leave us wondering precisely what he really thought and would have done. But they tell us a lot about how he operates in the face of political pressure. When Romney was trying to appease conservatives and win the Republican primaries, he went out of his way to attack the rescue as a waste of taxpayer dollars. When Romney was trying to win over voters in Michigan and, now, as he has been trying to win over voters in Ohio, he has emphasized the similarities between the remedy he proposed initially and the solution Obama eventually chose. Can anybody who’s followed these shifts say honestly Romney has the mettle to make a tough decision and stick with it?”

*****

One more item: Romney apparently got sucked in by reports Thursday on right-wing blogs that Chrysler was shifting all Jeep production to China. He told a campaign crowd in north Ohio – Jeep country – that Chrysler’s corporate owner, Italian automaker Fiat, was abandoning  the U.S. and, of course, it was another example of an Obama administration failure.

In fact, the bailout-haters had misinterpreted a Bloomberg News story that explained plans to have all Jeeps sold in China built in China.

Chrysler’s PR team fired back in extraordinarily blunt fashion.

The Bloomberg story, though accurate, "has given birth to a number of stories making readers believe that Chrysler plans to shift all Jeep production to China from North America, and therefore idle assembly lines and U.S. work force. It is a leap that would be difficult even for professional circus acrobats," Chrysler spokesman Gualberto Ranieri said.

"Let's set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China. It's simply reviewing the opportunities to return Jeep output to China for the world's largest auto market. U.S. Jeep assembly lines will continue to stay in operation."