Mitt Romney is in Michigan so I thought I’d read a Michigan newspaper and see how his campaign is coming.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney begins a swing through Michigan tonight with a dinner fund-raiser, followed by events in Birmingham and Grosse Pointe on Wednesday.
Democratic activists were holding a sign-making event tonight in Detroit targeting Romney for a column he wrote two years ago for the New York Times in which he argued against providing financial investment for Chrysler and General Motors. President Obama and the White House have been using the carmakers’ turnaround as a success story.
Here’s the 2008 NYTimes Romney column that’s getting the activists all worked up in Michigan.
Briefly, he loves cars, he loved his dad, he loved his dad’s cars, everyone everywhere should be either fired immediately or paid much less.
I thought this next part of the column was much more interesting than Romney’s boilerplate business blather.
Out of nowhere, there’s this:
I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration.
20 billion dollars a year in federally-funded research! Science and the like! This he believes. Deeply. I wonder if he’ll stick to it in 2011. If he does, it will be the first time he’s ever stood by anything he ever said or did, but who knows. This was the 2008 Mitt Romney, and he’s a different person now. People change. Some people change a lot, and frequently. Following him is going to be a lot of work. I suggest we identify which version of Mitt Romney we’re talking about by using model years: 2004 Romney, 2008 Romney, 2010 Romney, and finally, the newest model, the 2012 Romney.
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