Etch-A-Sketch Romney

Ann Romney, September 20, 2012 on Radio Iowa said - This is hard…It’s time that all Americans realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know how. So, let’s take a look.

Because of Romney’s changing views on March 21 Newt Gingrich whipped out an Etch-A-Sketch during a campaign stop in Lake Charles, Louisiana and then handed the toy to a child in the audience and said "she could now be a presidential candidate.” Before Rick Santorum dropped out of the race on March 23 he suggested Obama is preferable to Romney, on March 26 he called Romney ‘uniquely disqualified’ to be the Republican candidate for President and in April he said Romney is the worst Republican in the country.

In November 2008, Romney penned an op-ed opinion piece entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt" for the New York Times; it laid out his position on the auto bailout. The Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote in April 2009 that if automakers filed for bankruptcy at the time Romney wrote his op-ed, "it would have quickly led to a chain of bankruptcies by a whole set of parts suppliers all of whom are owed large amounts of money by these 2 companies. It is virtually certain that these companies and their suppliers would be forced to shut down because no one would have stepped forward to provide credit to operate through bankruptcy without a government guarantee." On February 22 Romney said "These companies need to go through managed bankruptcy" the companies should have been left on their own to "shed the extra costs" incurred by labor contracts with the United Auto Workers union. On May 7 in an interview with Cleveland‘s WEWS-TV Romney said “I’ll take a lot of credit” for the revival of the Detroit companies. In June he held this stance with The Detroit News and added: I think (Democrats) will try to distort what I was saying. On August 1 a new TV ad released by Romney's campaign said President Obama's 2009 auto bailout of General Motors (GM) and Chrysler led to job loss as car dealers had to close their dealerships (the ad was released on the heels of a poll showing Obama with a 6% lead in Ohio). On NBC's Meet the Press on September 9 Romney said: My view was GM should have gone into bankruptcy earlier. The president resisted that for 6 months. I said, "Let them go into bankruptcy. Help them come out. But let them go in." Besides flip-flopping, I find Romney’s lack of support for the auto industry interesting since his father was an automobile executive who became a millionaire off stock options. I have more on Romney’s character.