Cars and the Candidates’ Character

As the November 6 election approaches, Republican president-wannabe Mitt Romney is struggling to play down or just outright lie about his differences with President Obama over the U.S. government’s essential role in rescuing the American auto industry. But Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent asserts that Romney’s 2008 call to “let Detroit go bankrupt” is too revealing of his character and convictions to be overlooked.

... [T]heir differences on the auto bailout are enormously important, and are likely to matter a good deal to many battleground state voters, particularly in Ohio. As Jonathan Cohn writes in a must read, the auto bailout goes to the two men’s core differences on the most fundamental questions about whether government should act to save American industry and over government’s proper role in safeguarding Americans from economic harm. The auto rescue was unpopular when Obama pursued it, and Romney’s criticism of it at the time as a waste of taxpayer money was a politically expedient way for him to pander to conservatives in advance of the GOP primaries. And so, as Cohn notes, their disagreement over the auto bailout isn’t just illustrative of a core philosophical disagreement; it also goes to the question of which man “has the mettle to make a tough decision and stick with it” in the “face of political peril.”

Obama’s touting of the differences between the two candidates on auto bailout is not a “one trick pony.” It’s one of the main things this whole election should be all about.

You can read the whole piece here.

READ MORE: “Why Romney’s Bogus Jeep Claims Matter,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog).