Romney ad pushes back on auto bailout attacks

An ad airing in Ohio from Mitt Romney's campaign tries to dull some of the blows coming from President Barack Obama on Romney's stance on the auto bailout.

The spot claims Romney would be a better advocate than Obama for the American auto industry if he's elected president.

"Who will do more for the auto industry? Not Barack Obama," a narrator says. "Fact checkers confirm his attacks on Mitt Romney are false. The truth? Mitt Romney has a plan to help the auto industry. He's supported by Lee Iacocca and the Detroit News."

The narrator then moves to lines of attack that Romney's used on the stump, saying, "Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy, and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job."

The ad, which the ad tracker CMAG recorded airing in the Toledo market on Saturday morning, comes as polls in Ohio show a closely fought race. A CNN/ORC poll released Friday showed Obama holding a 4-point advantage over Romney in the contest for Ohio's much-fought over 18 electoral votes.

Obama's most potent criticism of Romney in Ohio has been his attacks on Romney's stance on the auto bailout, a program that began on former President George W. Bush's watch. Romney penned an op-ed in The New York Times in 2008 predicting that a government bailout of the Big Three American automakers would "virtually" guarantee the "demise" of the industry.

In the 2008 piece, Romney said the money needed to keep General Motors and Chrysler Group alive during bankruptcy should have come from the private sector, with the government providing only "guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing."

The problem was that there was no one other than the government available to write checks for the automakers in late 2008 and early 2009.

As for the claim that Chrysler was preparing to move production of Jeeps overseas, a spokesman for the company had earlier emphatically denied that report.

"Let's set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China," Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications Gualberto Ranieri wrote on Chrysler's blog.

Lis Smith, a spokeswoman for Obama's campaign, said the new Romney ad "is a sure sign that he knows he's in trouble in Ohio."

"When the American auto industry and a million workers' jobs were on the line, Mitt Romney turned his back. Now he's pretending it never happened and is trying to scare Ohioans by repeating a blatant falsehood that Chrysler is moving its Jeep operations to China."

She continued, "Mitt Romney might be willing to do anything to close the deal, but Ohioans know where he stood when it mattered most and won't be fooled by his dishonest ads in the final days of this campaign."