The Obama campaign is airing a new television television ad in Ohio and Michigan that hits back against recent ads from Republican challenger Mitt Romney that misleadingly imply President Obama’s policies led automakers to outsource American jobs to China. Romney’s ads, which began airing this week on television and radio in Ohio, have been criticized by fact-checkers as well as by General Motors and Chrysler.
The Obama ad, titled “Cynical,” quotes Politifact and The Washington Post, both of which gave the first Romney ad the highest rating for falsity.
It also quotes a GM spokesman calling a similar ad “politics at its cynical worst” and Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne calling the ads “inaccurate.”
The ad ends with the narrator saying, “We know the truth, Mitt,” then cuts to a clip of Romney saying, “That’s exactly what I said, that headline that you read, which it said, ‘Let Detroit go bankrupt.’ ”
Both Obama and Romney supported putting American automakers through bankruptcy, which Obama did it. But Romney opposed a public bailout of the automakers, arguing that financing should come from the private sector. It’s unclear whether private financing would have been forthcoming for the financially distressed industry.
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