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On the campaign trail: Romney gets his facts wrong

Turns out Jeep isn't moving to China.

By Nicky Woolf

There must be pool reporters covering the Romney campaign trail who by November 6 will have the Kid Rock song “Born Free” indelibly burned into their brains. Whenever it plays, for the rest of their lives, they will flinch and remember the campaign-trail – because every time Romney or Ryan appears at an event, it is Born Free that heralds their arrival. Every god-damn time.

It plays again in Defiance, Ohio – just up the road from where I’m staying in Hicksville – when a grinning Mitt Romney strides out to speak to a large and enthusiastic crowd on the high school football field, his hair slightly wind-blown. It was an all-star event; Romney was supported by both Ohio Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob Portman, who had played the role of Barack Obama in Romney’s debate preparations.

The audience of around 8,000 was, as usual for Romney, an older, whiter crowd, many who had come in from surrounding counties, Paulding, Williams, Puttnam, Henry, rural farmland areas which are more naturally conservative than the town of Defiance, which has a large United Auto Workers union presence and a huge GM foundry on the edge of town.

Governor Kasich’s speech was bullish. “I remember when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter and restored the American dream. And folks, I’ve got a feeling that this is that kind of election…” but Romney’s address was workaday. “That Obama campaign slogan, ‘forward’; well it doesn’t feel like moving forward to the 23 million Americans out of a job. I’ll tell you what does feels like moving forward: getting a new President!” was followed by massed chanting of “Mitt! Mitt! Mitt! Mitt!” and the re-hashing of Romney’s usual stump-speech “five-point plan” to deficit reduction, but – apart from at one point – nothing new to see here; even “you did build that” got an enthusiastic redux.

Local reporter Jack Palmer wasn’t too impressed with Romney’s performance. “I didn’t hear any new stuff,” he tells me. “But he was well-received by the crowd. The atmosphere was pretty good, though – they had some country music singers first.”

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One line was new, though, and played especially well for Romney here: “I heard this morning,” he told the crowd, “that Jeep is thinking of moving production to China.”

This would be a huge blow for the President. There is currently an enormous Jeep factory in Toledo, an hour from Defiance, and others in the state and in Michigan, and their survival is a key tenet of Obama’s reelection – at a visit to the Toledo plant in June he said that the car “symbolises freedom”.  “I’m not sure about that [Jeep line], says Palmer, skeptically. “I hadn’t heard that. You’ll have to fact-check that.”

I check it, and unfortunately for Romney it isn’t true at all. The line came out-of-context from a Bloomberg interview with a Chrysler executive – in context, he is actually saying that the company is thinking of expanding Jeep into China, not in fact closing and moving plants from the US: good news for American autos, not bad.

To remove all doubt, Chrysler said in a statement that: “Bloomberg recently produced a story that led some to incorrectly believe that all Jeep production could shift to China from North America. That is not true, and Bloomberg quickly amended its story to eliminate any potential inaccurate perception. To be clear, Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.”

Outside the rally, meanwhile, 150-odd Obama supporters and union activists were protesting, including Roger Molnar, a resident of Defiance. He tells me people have come to protest for  wide variety of reasons. “We’re for Obama, but there’s people with [libertarian candidate] Gary Johnson signs, stop the war with Iran signs, we are the 99 per cenr signs – there are a lot of issues here. The unions have their signs going on.”

Jacob Gallman, a cook at a restaurant in town, is also skeptical of Romney. “Personally, I think some of the stuff he does and says seems like he’s almost set up to fail. It’s hard to take him seriously.”

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