(Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
Mitt Romney made his
discredited claims about the auto industry rescue a centerpiece of his Michigan campaign—and they're being discredited still further just in time for Tuesday's primary in Ohio, another state in which the auto industry is an important employer. The
federal judge who handled Chrysler's bankruptcy did an interview with ABC News in which he refuted Romney's central claims that the auto companies should have gone through managed bankruptcy and not received government funding:
But Gonzalez, who retired from the federal bench on March 1, told ABC News: “One thing is clear, without government support in one fashion or another, there were no sources of funding.”
Gonzalez, now a law professor at New York University, said Chrysler — then the weakest of the Big 3 automakers — did not have the ability to secure financing on its own and “it was not generating sufficient cash to operate without an outside source of financing.”
Mitt Romney rarely clings this tenaciously to one position on any issue. It's truly bizarre to watch him do so on this one, where both the success of the America auto industry today and basically everyone involved in the industry rescue in 2008 and 2009 line up to say how very wrong Romney's one unchanging position is.