Romney Tells Channel 5 He Saved Auto Industry

During his trip to Euclid yesterday, Republican party hopeful Mitt Romney sat down with NewsChannel5‘s Chris Flanagan for an interview that touched on a couple of the usual campaign-trail subjects.

But the one that’s raising the most eyebrows is Romney’s comment that he’s responsible, partly at least, for reviving the tanking auto industry.

“I’ll take a lot of credit for the fact that this industry’s come back,” said the guy who actually opposed the 2008 bailout, which President Bush started and Obama extended.

Those two, in fact, are most responsible for saving the tanking auto industry.

Romney even went as far as to pen an editorial titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” back in 2008, laying out his strategy plan, which included a sort of “managed bankruptcy” to get the industry back on track.

The eventual bailout was actually structured a bit differently than Romney’s let’s-cut-the-fuckers-loose idea. But that’s not the way he sees it:

“My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what the president did. He finally took them through bankruptcy. That was the right course I argued for from the very beginning.”

Of course Romney blamed Obama for delaying the bankruptcy. And of course it was his idea all along to save the million jobs that were salvaged because of the bailout.

We can’t wait until July, when Romney takes credit for supporting gay marriage and being down with poor people. —Michael Gallucci

This article appears in May 2-8, 2012.