Just two days after I wrote about Mitt Romney's cynical decision to announce his GOP presidential bid in Michigan, the former Massachusetts Governor finds himself at the center of yet another interest group storm.
This time, it's the National Jewish Democratic Council, which lambasted Romney for selecting the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn as the backdrop for his White House campaign kick-off. The Council's Ira Forman said he was "deeply troubled by Governor Romney's choice of locations" for announcing his candidacy, which after all, was "the former estate of a well-known and outspoken anti-Semite and xenophobe."
The Henry Ford Museum is an odd choice for Romney '08, and not merely because Ford once received the Grand Service Cross of the Supreme Order of the German Eagle from Adolf Hitler and penned among other anti-Semitic screeds, "The International Jew: The World's Problem." The understandable concerns of Jewish Democrats notwithstanding, Romney's Ford Museum appearance is ill-conceived at best.
Today's Ford Motor Company is hardly the image of visionary business leadership Mitt Romney so loves to project. Ford lost a staggering $12.7 billion last year. The company is in the process of laying off 44,000 workers and shuttering 16 plants by 2012. (As a one-time corporate raider, Romney is well versed in the art of rust belt industrial downsizing.) In 2006, Ford was surpassed by Toyota in global vehicle sales. Romney spokesman Eric Ferhnstrom claims that "Governor Romney believes our country needs to put innovation at the forefront" and that "the Ford Museum embodies that bold, innovative spirit." As the business news attests, not so much.
The ironies of Mitt Romney in Dearborn, of course, don't end there. Romney's father George, after all, was president of the rival American Motor Corporation. AMC brought American drivers such innovative abominations as the Rambler, the Marlin, the Hornet, the Gremlin and the Pacer.
But the biggest irony remains that Mitt Romney doesn't live in Michigan. At last check, the former Bay State Governor lived in Belmont, Massachusetts just next to the People's Republic of Cambridge. And from 1999 to 2001, Romney lived in his $3.8 million Park City, Utah home, an out-of-state domicile that almost derailed his 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial bid.
After Tuesday, Romney's embrace of one of American industry's great anti-Semites will fade into history. But not, perhaps, his Edsel of a campaign.