Romney-Santorum Ad Wars Intensify in Michigan

The ad is Mr. Santorum’s first serious attempt to deflect what aides anticipate will be a barrage of negative attacks during the next two weeks as Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney campaign in Michigan ahead of the state’s Feb. 28 primary.

Those attacks began late on Tuesday when a “Super PAC” backing Mr. Romney released an ad alleging big government spending by Mr. Santorum while he served as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. Restore Our Future, the group behind the ad, has said it will spend at least $460,000 in Michigan during the next two weeks.

Mr. Santorum’s campaign has struggled to raise the millions of dollars he needs to compete with Mr. Romney and his allies. And it is unclear how much money he is spending to counter the super PAC attacks. But Mr. Santorum is clearly hoping to generate buzz — and free publicity — with the humorous new ad, titled “Rombo.”

In it, a Romney look-alike is shown trying to shoot mud at cardboard cutouts of Rick Santorum as an announcer says that “Mitt Romney’s negative attack machine is back, on full throttle.”

The ad complains that “Romney and his super PAC have spent a staggering $20 million brutally attacking fellow Republicans” and hammers Mr. Romney for “trying to hide from his big government Romneycare and his support for job killing cap-and-trade.” It ends with the Romney character being splattered with mud himself and the announcer saying: “in the end, Mitt Romney’s ugly attacks are going to backfire.”

“That’s the nature of politics which is that you always  accuse the other guy of what you’ve done yourself,” Mr. Romney said. “My  campaign hasn’t run any negative ads against Rick Santorum. His campaign ran  attack ads against me in South Carolina and his PAC did so in  Missouri. So, I’ not saying we won’t finally go after the guy,  but frankly, he’s been going to go after me, as that ad suggests.”

The political air wars over Michigan have begun in earnest as four national polls this week — including one by The New York Times — shows Mr. Santorum surging from the bottom of the pack of Republican candidates into a virtual tie with Mr. Romney. 

Mr. Romney on Tuesday moved to shore up support in his boyhood home of Michigan with a positive commercial about his ties to the state and an opinion article defending his 2008 position to let the auto industry go bankrupt.

Mr. Romney’s new advertisement, called “Growing Up,” shows him driving a car and reminiscing about life in Detroit. He criticizes President Obama and concludes by saying: “I want to make Michigan stronger and better. Michigan’s been my home, and this is personal.”

The commercial is to begin running on Wednesday. And according to a rival campaign that is tracking media spending, Mr. Romney has spent $1.2 million on commercial time in Michigan. He will be going on the air in all the largest markets — from Detroit in the southeast to Traverse City in the northwest.

Mr. Romney also sought to highlight his connections to Michigan in the opinion article published in The Detroit News on Tuesday, while also deflecting potential criticism about his opposition to federal loans to rescue the auto industry.

Noting that he was born in Detroit and that his father was president of the American Motors car company in the 1950s, Mr. Romney wrote that he was 7 years old when he got his “love of cars and chrome and fins and roaring motors” from his father.

But the main message of the piece was to defend an Op-Ed article Mr. Romney wrote just two weeks after the nation chose Barack Obama as president in 2008. Published in The New York Times, it had the simple headline “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Mr. Romney’s explanation is a complicated one, especially given the industry’s remarkable turnaround in the last three years.

Mr. Romney says he always favored what he calls a “managed bankruptcy” for the auto companies that would have allowed the businesses to restructure and emerge stronger than before. He criticized Mr. Obama for choosing what he called a “bailout” of the industry that benefited big labor unions.

But Mr. Romney next acknowledges that General Motors and Chrysler did in fact go through a “managed bankruptcy” at the urging of Mr. Obama’s administration — and he takes credit for being the one to have the idea first.

“Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation,” Mr. Romney wrote in the piece. “The course I recommended was eventually followed.”

Officials in Mr. Obama’s administration, and many economists in both parties, scoff at Mr. Romney’s suggestion that a managed bankruptcy was possible without the billions of dollars in government aid to the car companies. They say Wall Street and private equity firms in early 2009 were in no position to lend the kind of money that the companies needed to manage the bankruptcy process in an orderly fashion.

Bill Vlasic contributed reporting from Detroit, and Jeremy W. Peters from New York.

View the original article here