“THIS IS personal,” Mitt Romney says at the close of a new television advertisement that began airing in Michigan yesterday.
The television spot, along with an attack ad portraying Romney’s surging conservative challenger Rick Santorum as a “Washington insider”, is a sign of the panic that seized the Romney campaign after Santorum won Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri last week.
The winner of the February 28th Michigan primary will be in a strong position for the “Super Tuesday” votes across 10 states a week later. More than 400 of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination will be awarded on March 6th.
Four national polls this week have shown Romney and Santorum virtually tied. A Public Policy Polling survey conducted in Michigan from February 10th-12th showed Santorum with a dramatic lead there of 39 per cent to 24 per cent for Romney.
Both Romney and Santorum are neglecting Arizona, which will also vote on February 28th, to concentrate on Michigan.
Some commentators say Romney could not survive a defeat in Michigan, considered his home state, although he left to study at Harvard in 1971 and has lived most of his adult life in Boston, where his campaign is headquartered.
Romney was born in Detroit, grew up in Michigan and courted his wife, Ann, there. His father, George, was the chief executive of the now-defunct American Motors Corporation and a three-term governor of the state. Romney launched his last presidential campaign at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, and won the 2008 Republican primary by nine percentage points.
In an opinion piece in the Detroit News this week, Romney wrote that his father gave him a “love of cars and chrome and fins and roaring motors” when he was seven. In the new “Growing Up” advertisement, Romney recalls attending the Detroit Auto Show with George and asks: “How in the world did an industry and its leaders and its unions get in such a fix that they lost jobs, that they lost their future?” The question sounds absurd when General Motors has just announced $8 billion in profits for 2011, and hopes to make $10 billion this year. Chrysler, the other Detroit company saved by the Obama administration’s $81 billion bailout, has reported $225 million in profits for the fourth quarter of 2011.
The Democratic party had intended to highlight Romney’s opposition to the bailout in the presidential election, if Romney secures the nomination. Perhaps trying to defuse the issue, Romney published a strange self-defence in the Detroit News, slamming the successful bailout as “crony capitalism” designed to benefit “unions and the union bosses who contributed millions to Barack Obama’s election campaign”.
In an opinion piece in the New York Times shortly after Obama’s election in 2008, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt”, Romney predicted: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye.” Romney now claims the strategy of a “managed bankruptcy” that he advocated was eventually followed by the Obama administration.
But criticising the auto bailout and trade unions in Michigan is risky. The state holds an open primary, in which Republicans and Democrats can vote. A quarter of participants in the 2008 primary said their family included at least one union member.
Nearly a third of Michigan’s Republican primary voters are Catholic, like Santorum. The state’s powerful anti-abortion movement has backed two-thirds of state legislators. Santorum is an outspoken anti-abortion activist, whereas Romney supported abortion rights in campaigns in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002, before changing his position to stand for the presidency.