Hardball host Chris Matthews skewered Mitt Romney over his latest misleading ads, which claim Chrysler is moving Jeep production to China because of President Obama’s policies.
After playing the ad on Tuesday, the msnbc host declared, “It sounds terrible. But it’s false.”
The fact of the matter is, Chrysler does plan to start hiring more Chinese workers to build Jeeps in China – but not at the expense of American jobs, as Romney suggests. No U.S. jobs are being shipped overseas. Instead, the Chinese-made Jeeps are a new enterprise intended to allow a U.S. company to further expand into the Chinese auto market, where a growing middle-class has created huge demand for vehicles.
“You know weeks ago, the Romney campaign said, ‘We’re not gong to let this campaign be run by fact checkers.’ I mean. I’ve never heard it said that ‘we don’t’ care if you find out we’re lying…we don’t’ care if you catch us, we’re going to keep doing it,’” said Matthews.
The ads for television and radio are running in Ohio—the most critical battleground state in the country—and seek to connect the president to a report saying Chrysler plans to move Jeep production to China. Chrysler has since released a statement calling the report bogus.
Ron Reagan, msnbc political analyst and son of the former Republican president, said Romney’s lie was “extraordinary,” adding “the question is do Ohioans, do Americans, do the media tolerate this level of dishonesty for a presidential candidate? I hope not.” Former Republican National Chairman Michael Steele tried to clarify Romney’s ad, saying some in Romney’s camp were walking the ad back. “The emphasis is not that these jobs will be taken away from Ohio or Ohioans but in fact they are creating jobs in China when we should be creating jobs here,” Steele said. Reagan hit back, saying that if Romney had meant, “’Gee, we’re gong to be making a bunch of jeeps for the Chinese, maybe we should make them here,’ that was a point he could have made. He didn’t say that, the ads don’t imply that…what he said is jobs here now are going to China…that was a lie.”Recommended
