PRESIDENT BARACK Obama mocked Mitt Romney yesterday in a speech to the United Auto Workers, on the day Mr Romney’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination was in jeopardy in Michigan, America’s automobile capital.
Mr Obama did not name Mr Romney in his spirited, 25-minute address, but the allusion was clear. “Some politicians” had said General Motors and Chrysler should be allowed to fail, Mr Obama recalled. “Some even said we should ‘let Detroit go bankrupt’,” he added. (A now infamous article written by Mr Romney in 2008 was titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”.)
The audience, at a conference in Washington, cheered Mr Obama and booed when he referred to Republican candidates. Were it not for the $82 billion bailout he put in place three years ago, the president said, “GM and Chrysler wouldn’t exist today”.
Once proud companies would have been chopped up and sold for scrap. “And all of you – the men and women who built these companies with your own hands – would’ve been hung out to dry.”
One in five auto workers – 400,000 men and women – lost their jobs before he took office, Mr Obama said. “More than one million . . . would have lost their jobs in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression” if he had not acted. Instead, 200,000 new jobs had been created and Detroit was building more fuel-efficient, better designed cars which it would soon export to Asia. It was a far cry from Mr Romney’s denigration of “union bosses”, “union stooges” and “big labour”.
“I have to admit it’s been funny watching some of these politicians completely rewriting history now that you’re back on your feet,” Mr Obama said. The Republicans now claimed they’d been right all along. “Or worse, they’re saying that the problem is that you, the workers, made out like bandits in all of this; that saving the American auto industry was just about paying back unions.
“Really?” Mr Obama asked with mock incredulity. “Even by the standards of this town, that’s a load of you-know-what.”
Mr Obama created a them-and-us solidarity with the workers. “They’re still talking about you as if you’re some greedy special interest that needs to be beaten,” he said of the Republicans. “Since when are hard-working men and women ‘special interests’?
“To borrow a line from our old friend Ted Kennedy: what is it about working men and women they find so offensive?”
Although he too opposed the bailout, Rick Santorum also exploited the issue against Mr Romney. Any resident of the state could vote in yesterday’s primary, so the Santorum campaign made “robo calls” to Michigan Democrats, urging them to vote against Mr Romney on the grounds that he “supported the bailout for his Wall Street billionaire buddies, but opposed the auto bailout. That was a slap in the face to every Michigan worker.”
On Fox News, Mr Romney said the calls were a “dirty trick” and that it was “outrageous to see Rick Santorum team up with the Obama people and go out after union labour in Detroit and try to get them to vote against me.”
Mr Santorum has tried to appeal to the working class, describing himself as “an Italian guy from a steel town who grew up understanding what makes this country great”. He talks about his grandfather, a coal miner, not his university-educated father.
Mr Romney’s attempts to be like the common man invariably fail, though he stresses that his late father – a chief executive of American Motors and governor of Michigan – never finished university, apprenticed as a carpenter and could “take a handful of nails, stick them in his mouth and then, you know, spit them out, pointy end forward.”
Working class or blue-collar is a euphemism for non-college educated, said Prof John Russo, co-director of the Centre for Working Class Studies at Youngstown State University in Ohio. Mr Santorum last week attacked Mr Obama as a “snob” for saying all American young people should go to college.