Amazing: The Detroit News Endorses Romney
The writing on the wall is visible even from Detroit. (Remember Detroit?) Imagine what would have been said, just a few ago, if someone had suggested that a Detroit—Detroit! The place that used to makes cars . . .—imagine the reaction if someone had suggested that a newspaper in Detroit would come out and endorse Mitt Romney, not Barack “Mr. Auto Bailout” Obama.
But that’s exactly what the Detroit News has done. In an editorial titled “Mitt Romney for President,” the paper lays out the case. Two key passages:
President Barack Obama came into office in 2009 riding a wave of hope and change. Unfortunately, he has not delivered on the nation’s yearning for change nor on the specific promises he made to fix what is broken. The president is asking the country to be patient, but his plan isn’t producing results that would merit more patience, and the president hasn’t spelled out what he would do differently in a second term.
Not even Mitt Romney could put it better than that.
As the News goes on to observe, hope and change are still what Americans seek, it’s just that they are disenchanted with Barack Obama’s failure to deliver either. Mitt ROmney has a much more credible, and much less partisan, vision on offer.
The paper dilates on some specifics of Romney’s plan—and pace Obama, there are plenty of specifics—but it also makes this thoughtful observation: “America,” its editorialist writes, “is locked in a struggle over what it will be as a mature nation.” Got that right. And then there’s this:
A country built on rugged individualism finds itself increasingly under the thumb of a federal government that is ever expanding its reach into the lives of its citizens.
Obama has proved himself a disciple of the doctrine that for every problem there’s a government solution.
Romney, by contrast, embraces individual initiative and entrepreneurship. He would turn back the encroachment of the bureaucracy into the private sector.
Romney would replace the heavy hand of government with the invisible hand of a rational marketplace working to produce broad prosperity.
“Broad Prosperity.” The beneficent working of “a rational marketplace.” “Individual initiative.” “The private sector.” “Rugged individualism.” These are good things. They’re what Romney plausibly promises to deliver. They’re also things Obama loathes. The choice is clear. Even Detroit sees that.
When I lived in Detroit (suburbs) the Detroit News trended conservative while the Detroit Free Press trended liberal.
This has nothing to do with the above. I live in New Zealand and recently read your superb book The Rape of the Masters.How anyone can read what Professor (?) Lubin does into paintings is extraordinary. If he really believes all that about names, I wonder that he hasn’t changed his own name, given that Lubin was the generic name for a bucolic swain; one step up from calling someone a country bumpkin.
Another key point in the editorial:
We recognize and are grateful for the extraordinary contribution President Obama made to Michigan in leading the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler. Had either of those companies been allowed to go under, Michigan’s economic maladies would have become fatal.
The president stepped up with the support the two automakers needed to keep themselves and their suppliers in business. We have said in past editorials that while Romney rightly advocated for structured bankruptcies in his infamous “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” New York Times op-ed, he was wrong in suggesting the automakers could have found operating capital in the private markets. In that article, Romney suggested government-backed loans to keep the companies afloat post bankruptcy. But what GM and Chrysler needed were bridge loans to get them through the process, and the private credit markets were unwilling to provide them. Obama put a rescue team to work and they were true to the task.
As MarcH points out, this is not really a surprise. The Detroit News has tended conservative for as long as I can remember, and I am no spring chicken. The real surprise would be if the Free Press endorsed Romney, but the chances of that happening are about the same as the chances of Lucy Lawless ringing my doorbell and asking if she can come in and get out of these wet clothes–possible but not likely.
Neither of them is a decent newspaper but the News these days is a bit better tan the relentlessly trivial Free Press.