Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. Years later, I watched with sadness as it floundered. My view at the time — and I set it out plainly in an op-ed in the New York Times — was that "the American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing." A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. Both were saddled with an accumulation of labor, pension, and real estate costs that made them unsustainable.
– Three years ago, Mitt Romney wrote that President Obama should "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt," instead of bailing out the struggling auto industry, in a famous New York Times column. And today? Even with the American auto industry on the rebound, Michigan's GOP primary looming on Feb. 28, and Rick Santorum breathing down his neck in the polls, Romney still thinks bankruptcy would have been better than the president's "crony capitalism," he writes in the Detroit News. "I believe that without his intervention things there would be better," he writes. Romney's big complaint with the bailout? That "secured creditors" got screwed and non-union employees had their benefits slashed while a union-controlled trust got 55% of Chrysler and the unions had their pensions saved. "It is not the American way of making cars," writes Romney. None other than former President George W. Bush is taking the opposite side in the post-mortem, saying that he was responsible for the first $25 billion bailout, and it was definitely a good thing. “I didn’t want there to be 21% unemployment,” Bush told the National Automobile Dealers Association last week, reports the Washington Post. "Sometimes circumstances get in the way of philosophy.”