Obama Jabs Romney on Autos, But Not Naming Names
President Obama has been quite insistent that he is not ready to engage the Republican presidential candidates until the GOP settles on its nominee. "Once they narrow it down to one of two, I'll start paying attention," he said several times. And in his Super Bowl interview with NBC's Matt Lauer, he insisted he will hold his comments "until the Republicans decide who their nominee is going to be." He added, "I think most people are thinking the election is nine months away; the last thing we need is to start it right now when the other side hasn't determined its nominee."
But it's not too early to call attention to the success of one of his policies that was opposed by the leading Republican candidate. And as the good news keeps rolling in from the U.S. auto industry, the president has not been at all bashful about calling attention to what the White House sees as the politically unpalatable position taken on U.S. automakers by that Republican candidate - even if the president is always careful not to mention him by name.
In Milwaukee on Wednesday, there wasn't much doubt that Obama was talking about Mitt Romney when he visited a plant. "When I took office -- a lot of UAW workers here, you guys remember this -- when I took office, the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse. And there were some folks who said we should let it die," he said.
Noting that there were "a million jobs at stake," the president concluded, to great applause, "I refused to let that happen."
The president's jab came as General Motors reported its largest profit ever, $7.6 billion in 2011. And it comes as Romney campaigns in Michigan, struggling there to explain his opposition to the efforts by Obama to rescue the then-ailing industry in 2009.
Obama now casts his bailout of the automakers as a demand for responsibility. "We got workers and automakers to settle their differences," he said in Milwaukee. "We got the industry to restructure and retool, come up with better designs. Today, the American auto industry is back. And General Motors is once again the number-one automaker in the world. Chrysler has grown faster in the U.S. than any major car company. Ford is investing billions in U.S. plants and equipment and factories. And all together, over the past two years, the entire industry has added nearly 160,000 jobs."
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