A Visitor in Town

Mitt Romney is in town. Since the primary is 2 weeks in the future, he will be around for a while, and - like the old saying - guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days; sometimes earlier.

The Economist sums it up:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/02/mitt-romney-and-car-industry

"Had the government not stepped in, GM might have restructured under normal bankruptcy procedures, without putting public money at risk", we said. But "given the panic that gripped private purse-strings...it is more likely that GM would have been liquidated, sending a cascade of destruction through the supply chain on which its rivals, too, depended." Even Ford, which avoided bankruptcy, feared the industry would collapse if GM went down. At the time that seemed like a real possibility. The credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history in claiming to have been right all along.

The painful fact for Romney is that the bail-out worked. He has a hypothetical that going through normal bankruptcy would have been the best course, but he now must argue that hypothetical against 2011's being the best year for domestic auto since the financial crisis began.

I find Mr. Romney to be a very odd fish... very odd. And he is beginning to out live his welcome. He may indeed have been born in Detroit, but he only comes around when he needs votes. He senses the outlandishness of the situation, so he lectures to everyone around that when he slapped us with his left hand, and then his right, it was for our betterment.

Romney is too protean: he has too many faces, and all of them tell us why he's better than we are.
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