Romney's Car Problem - by Los Angeles Times

  



Romney's car problem                 
----------------              Los Angeles Times Editorial      March 19, 2012  

 [By insisting that the auto industry bailout was a mistake, he hands Obama a clear line of attack.] 

Mitt Romney has car trouble. No, we're not referring to the notorious 1983 incident in which he forced the family dog to ride in a crate strapped to the top of his station wagon, but a matter likely to hurt him far more with blue-collar voters: his contention that the bailouts of the U.S. automotive industry by both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama were a bad idea. 

If a speech last week by Vice President Joe Biden is any indicator, the Obama campaign is going to use the auto bailouts as a sledgehammer against Romney, should the latter emerge as the GOP nominee. Rallying a union crowd in Ohio, Biden slammed Romney for claiming that bailing out the Detroit automakers would turn them into the "living dead." 

 "Gov. Romney's predictions of a living dead? We have now living proof: a million jobs saved, 200,000 new jobs created," Biden said, to cheers. With Romney trying to sell himself as a better steward of the economy than Obama, his demonstrably wrong conclusions about the bailouts are grist for the Obama attack mill (the other GOP presidential contenders also opposed the bailouts, but the Obama campaign is focusing its criticisms on Romney). In 2008, Romney wrote an op-ed for the New York Times that began, "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye." Not only has the industry failed to vanish, but GM has reported record profits and regained its crown as the world's biggest automaker. 

Romney compounds his problem by continuing to insist the bailouts were a mistake. His argument is twofold: The companies should have been allowed to go through a "managed bankruptcy" without government intervention, which would have reduced taxpayer risk. And, because the restructuring that followed the bailouts ended up handing large ownership stakes in GM and Chrysler to the United Auto Workers, "the president gave the companies to the UAW." Both propositions are disingenuous. A bailout-free bankruptcy would indeed have been a preferable option in 2008, but it wasn't a realistic one. The automakers needed a big infusion of cash to stay afloat during bankruptcy proceedings, and no bank was willing to provide it, making Washington the lender of last resort. Had the government failed to act, not only would the two companies likely have been liquidated but they would have taken much of the U.S. auto sector — parts makers and other suppliers — with them, causing devastating job losses. Meanwhile, the UAW ended up with big shares in the automakers because the companies were so deeply indebted to the union. That would have been the outcome even if Romney's bailout-free bankruptcy had taken place. 

If ever there were an issue begging for a Romney flip-flop, the auto bailouts would be it. By uncharacteristically sticking with a losing position, Romney could be handing the keys to manufacturing states to Obama. 

 

"Preach Hope not Fear!" - E J Dionne jr.

I’m not quitting the church ------------------------   By E.J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer, Washington Post Published: May 13, 2012
Recently, a group called the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF) ran a full-page ad in The Washington Post cast as an “open letter to ‘liberal’ and ‘nominal’ Catholics.” Its headline commanded: “It’s Time to Quit the Catholic Church.”

The ad included the usual criticism of Catholicism, but I was most struck by this paragraph: “If you think you can change the church from within — get it to lighten up on birth control, gay rights, marriage equality, embryonic stem-cell research — you’re deluding yourself. By remaining a ‘good Catholic,’ you are doing ‘bad’ to women’s rights. You are an enabler. And it’s got to stop.”

My, my. Putting aside the group’s love for unnecessary quotation marks, it was shocking to learn that I’m an “enabler” doing “bad” to women’s rights. But Catholic liberals get used to these kinds of things. Secularists, who never liked Catholicism in the first place, want us to leave the church, but so do Catholic conservatives who want the church all to themselves.

I’m sorry to inform the FFRF that I am declining its invitation to quit. It may not see the Gospel as a liberating document, but I do, and I can’t ignore the good done in the name of Christ by the sisters, priests, brothers and lay people who have devoted their lives to the poor and the marginalized.

And on women’s rights, I take as my guide that early feminist Pope John XXIII. In Pacem in Terris, his encyclical issued in 1963, the same year Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique,” Pope John spoke of women’s “natural dignity.”

“Far from being content with a purely passive role or allowing themselves to be regarded as a kind of instrument,” he wrote, “they are demanding both in domestic and in public life the rights and duties which belong to them as human persons.”

I’d like the FFRF to learn more about the good Pope John, but I wish our current bishops would think more about him, too. I wonder if the bishops realize how some in their ranks have strengthened the hands of the church’s adversaries (and disheartened many of the faithful) with public statements — including that odious comparison of President Obama to Hitler by a Peoria prelate last month — that threaten to shrink the church into a narrow, conservative sect.

Do the bishops notice how often those of us who regularly defend the church turn to the work of nuns on behalf of charity and justice to prove Catholicism’s detractors wrong? Why in the world would the Vatican, apparently pushed by right-wing American bishops, think it was a good idea to condemn the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the main organization of nuns in the United States?

The Vatican’s statement, issued last month, seemed to be the revenge of conservative bishops against the many nuns who broke with the hierarchy and supported health-care reform in 2010. The nuns insisted, correctly, that the health-care law did not fund abortion. This didn’t sit well with men unaccustomed to being contradicted, and the Vatican took the LCWR to task for statements that “disagree with or challenge positions taken by the bishops.”

Oh yes, and the nuns are also scolded for talking a great deal about social justice and not enough about abortion (as if the church doesn’t talk enough about abortion already). But has it occurred to the bishops that less stridency might change more hearts and minds on this very difficult question?

A thoughtful friend recently noted that carrying a child to term is an act of overwhelming generosity. For nine months, a woman gives her body to another life, not to mention the rest of her years. Might the bishops consider that their preaching on abortion would have more credibility if they treated women in the church, including nuns, with the kind of generosity they are asking of potential mothers? They might usefully embrace a similar attitude toward gay men and lesbians.

Too many bishops seem in the grip of dark suspicions that our culture is moving at breakneck speed toward a demonic end. Pope John XXIII, by contrast, was more optimistic about the signs of the times.

“Distrustful souls see only darkness burdening the face of the earth,” he once said. “We prefer instead to reaffirm all our confidence in our Savior who has not abandoned the world which he redeemed.” The church best answers its critics when it remembers that its mission is to preach hope, not fear.

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ejdionne@washpost.com