Wednesday, January 16, 2008

And the truth shall set you free??

John McCain told the truth in Michigan, Mitt Romney did not. Now Mitt has won Michigan and John McCain has not.

"I've got to give you some straight talk: Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back," McCain said Wednesday in Grand Rapids. "They are not. And I am sorry to tell you that."

McCain is largely bereft of economic nostalgia, saying in Livonia that it "wasn't government's job to protect buggy factories and haberdashers when cars replaced carriages and men stopped wearing hats. But it is government's job to help workers get the education and training they need for the new jobs that will be created by new businesses in this new century."

For those displaced by job loss, McCain has proposed new worker-retraining and short-term unemployment programs and suggested subsidies that would offset a disparity in salary for those moving to lower-paying work.

Meanwhile Romney, whose dad was once president of American Motors (the worst car company ever and yes I'm familiar with the Trabant) says he won't accept that "defeatist" attitude.

In Michigan, Romney's campaign has portrayed McCain's attitude as a gesture of abandonment toward the state, which Romney has identified as a "canary in the mine shaft" of the national economy. "It tells you he doesn't understand this internationally competitive world we live in today," Ron Kaufman, a Romney adviser, said of McCain. "You can not give away any job for any reason."

Now, Mitt is actually a smart guy, he knows he's full of it and he has no plans to deliver on anything he said. It's just noise, like all the other politicians, except for my boy John McCain. For all McCain's faults I love how he lays the smack down even when it's not in his best short term interests.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I doan wanna lern stuff. I wanna install door bolts. An I wanna make $112000 a yer doin it. An I wan ma kids to install door bolts, jus lik pa.

Anonymous said...

In every media report from Michigan I encountered prior to the election I was struck by the complete lack of mention of the FRIGGIN UNBELIEVABLY HIGH TAX RATES IN THAT EFFFING STATE. No discussion about that being part of the problem.

Anonymous said...

It's not quite as bad as it looks.

Exit poll breakdowns indicate Romeny's BS played best with those who aren't concerned about the economy, while McCain's strait talk played well with those who are.

Anonymous said...

At the same time, as Steven Landsburg has pointed out, McCain still promotes that idea that the state should pay to retrain all of those people who lose out. McCain may be better than Romney, but that's not saying much.