Update on the Jeep Story [Updated]

    Mitt Romney made some news today by citing the story about Chrysler considering restarting production of Jeeps in China.  CBS reports:

On Thursday, Romney told a rally in Defiance, Ohio, site of a General Motors plant, "I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state Jeep -- now owned by the Italians -- is thinking of moving all production to China. I will fight for every good job in America. I'm going to fight to make sure trade is fair, and if it's fair America will win."

     The problem was in the phrase "thinking of moving all production to China."  The way the Bloomberg was written gave rise to the misinterpretation with the following sentence:

Fiat SpA (F), majority owner of Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country[.]

    Another sentence was also misleading and rather awkwardly written:

[Mike Manley, chief operating officer of Fiat and Chrysler in Asia said]“We’re reviewing the opportunities within existing capacity” as well as “should we be localizing the entire Jeep portfolio or some of the Jeep portfolio.”

    However, further into the story, the following statement appears:

 Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China. 

    My post on Wednesday (the first blog to note the story as far as I can tell*) included this quote which was unfortunately absent from some of the other sites which picked up the Jeep story later (one of which was linked to by the Drudge Report on Thursday.)  The Romney campaign apparently passed on the story to Mitt Romney without the clarification.  Left wing media and the Obama campaign jumped on the misstatement, and Chrysler even wrote a blog post to clarify the misinterpretations of the Bloomberg story.

    Besides the hit to Romney's credibility, the most unfortunate part of this episode is that it distracts from the point I was originally making by citing the story.  The Obama campaign has made much hay out of Romney being an "outsourcing pioneer." Then, in the same week the Obama campaign released its second term agenda which includes a photo (at right) of Obama speaking at a Jeep factory touting American jobs, a story comes out that Chrysler, one of the administration's success stories, in thinking about jobs in China.  Personally, I don't have a problem with that and neither do most conservatives.  But the Obama campaign hasn't touted creating jobs in China, and now that irony will be largely obscured.

---------------

*Update:  I found this reference to the Bloomberg story originally posted on 10/22 at a blog called FidoSysop's Blog and Forums.

Ohio, Obama, and Optics: Chrysler Considers Building Jeeps in China

UPDATE here.

    This week, the Obama campaign released a glossy 20-page booklet laying out the President's second term agenda.  On page 3, there is a section entitled "Reviving American Manufacturing":

Manufacturing and technology are the life-blood of middle-class families and key engines of the American economy, sparking innovation, generating higher-wage jobs, and strengthening entire communities. But we can’t create an economy built to last if America doesn’t make things the world buys.

The backdrop for the page is the following photo:

    The photo was taken on June 3, 2011 at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, where the president gave a speech.  That's a Jeep Wrangler in the background.

    In a potentially embarrassing coincidence, the following story appeared at Bloomberg on Monday, the day before the booklet was released:

Fiat SpA (F), majority owner of Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country, according to the head of both automakers’ operations in the region.
Fiat is in “very detailed conversations” with its Chinese partner, Guangzhou Automobile Group Co. (2238), about making Jeeps in the world’s largest auto market, said Mike Manley, chief operating officer of Fiat and Chrysler in Asia. Chrysler hasn’t built Jeeps there since before Fiat took control in 2009.

    The story does go on to suggest this would not affect its plants in the United States:

Chrysler currently builds all Jeep SUV models at plants in Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. Manley referred to adding Jeep production sites rather than shifting output from North America to China.

    However, a related story at AutoGuide.com notes [emphasis added]:

Jeep is considering shipping its manufacturing to China in a cost-saving measure on the heels of weak European demand.
Weakness in the European auto market lead to slow sales for Chrysler but strong demand in China buoyed the brand. In fact, business in China is good enough that Chrysler might transplant its manufacturing operations. Should brand execs pull the trigger, it would mark the first time Chrysler built Jeeps in China since before 2009 when Fiat took a stake in the company.
That contradicts what Fiat-Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said almost a year ago amid concerns that Wrangler production might move from its current plant in Toledo, Ohio.
“This plant has been at the heart of what we’ve done. I’ve said publicly that I would never build the Wrangler outside the U.S. and outside of Toledo. These are things that are unthinkable — to assemble a Wrangler somewhere else,” Marchionne said in November, 2011.
But what was unthinkable a year ago might not seem so foreign. Manufacturing Jeep products in China could help the company save money while feeding a growing market with reduced expenses.
Mike Manley, Fiat Chrysler’s COO in Asia, seems bullish of the possibility. “The volume opportunity for us is very significant,” he, said to Bloomberg. “We’re reviewing the opportunities within existing capacity.”
Jeep’s sales in China more than doubled this year to 33,463 units through September, which could encourage the move further.
Despite that, moving all of the brand’s production to China wouldn’t sit well with American consumers.

    Most agree this election will turn on the economy and jobs.  For a campaign concerned about "optics," the timing of this story could not be worse.   And with Ohio's position as the number one battleground state in the upcoming election, the location couldn't be worse, either.

Barack Obama: A "New Economic Patriotism"; Not So New

    Since September 27, the President has used the phrase "new economic patriotism" seven times according to White House transcripts of his remarks and speeches.  The most recent was on Friday, October 5th, and was promptly tweeted out by the Obama campaign:

    Much has already been made of the Orwellian sound of the phrase, as well as the audacity of linking patriotism to his own economic policies which are far from universally accepted. The president did not coin the phrase "economic patriotism".  It first appeared in 2005 according to an article at EuroTopics , coined by former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.  It appeared in connection with Barack Obama in the title of an article at The Root back in February 2011, and as recently as August 2012, co-chairman of President Obama’s campaign Ted Strickland hit Mitt Romney for his lack of "economic patriotism."  But the term struck me because of something I read in the recently uncovered course outline of Professor Barack Obama's  Constitutional Law III class at the University of Chicago which I wrote about last Wednesday.

    The Introduction section of the outline, entitled "What is Equality (Thomson)", was apparently based on a rather obscure book published in 1949 by British historian David Thomson called "Equality." Although the book appears to be a general discussion of "equality" and how it has been interpreted over the years in a political context in relation to legal, religious, and economic considerations among others, the term "economic equality" shows up on the first page of the book and appears a total of 32 times in the whole book.  It is noteworthy then that the last point in the Con Law III Introduction outline is:

(10) Centralized Gov’t = development and implementation of egalitarianism.

    For someone who ran for and was elected President of the United States within a decade of teaching this class, this point in the outline seems especially significant in view of where Thomson takes the discussion of equality in chapter 5, which is entitled "Economic Equality."  Thomas writes [emphasis mine]:

Many who would stoutly defend with their dying breath the rights of liberty and equality described above (as would many English or American liberals) shrink back with horror from the notion of economic egalitarianism.  There is no more fundamental task, in any modern discussion of equality,  than to discover why the ideal of equality, so generally accepted in the legal, religious and political arrangements of the modern democratic state, is still so stoutly resisted in its applications to economic life.  Here is the very crux of our whole argument.

    I have not read the whole book (yet), so I cannot say for sure if Thomson is advocating for government-enforced economic equality or just explicating the arguments behind it.  But Professor Obama chose this book as a basis for the introduction for this class on Constitutional Law, so it is not unreasonable to assume it had a significant impact on the development of his views, or at least served to help express those views to his students.  The president famously if inelegantly voiced his views to Joe the Plumber as "spread the wealth around," and now more recently and elegantly as a "new economic patriotism."  But both reflect that final point in the introductory outline above, "Centralized Gov’t = development and implementation of egalitarianism," where equality seems to focus more on outcomes than opportunities.

    When a person swears to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States, it is reasonable that voters be told what his views are, or were, and how they developed and changed over the years.  When that person actually taught the Constitution in a major university, that information should be widely and readily available.  Instead, information is still surfacing four years after the fact.

    While these views of President Obama are certainly not new or surprising now that we are more than three and a half years into his first term, the fact that this outline and its sources were not available to the American public in 2008 represents yet another failure on the part of the media.  Can this old outline shed light on Barack Obama's call for a "new economic patriotism"?  That largely remains to be seen, but at least now the media and the electorate have one more resource to help make that determination.