Yes, it’s passé to keep making fun of Mitt Romney. It is 2013. But when Chrysler released Jeep’s year-end sales figures, we couldn’t resist.
You may remember that in the dying days of Mitt Romney’s campaign, he started making false claims about how President Obama’s auto bailout was responsible for shipping automobile jobs to overseas.
He told a crowd in Defiance, Ohio, on Oct. 25: "I saw a story today: One of the great manufacturers of this state, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China."
In fact, the scandal surrounding an ad run in Ohio to “prove” the president was shipping Jeep jobs to China became the bigger story–so much that Politifact voted the ad its “Lie of the Year.”
And now we know how big a lie it really was.
Chrysler has just reported that Jeep had its biggest sales year since 1999, up by double digits in all parts of the world. That includes the United States, where sales were up 13%. And in Asia–where sales nearly doubled.
The numbers bear out what the original Bloomberg article was saying–and that the Romney folk were misquoting–which is that Chrysler was building more jeeps in China because they were selling more jeeps in China. Jobs weren’t being shipped over there. They were being created from the ground up because people, the world over, like Jeep.
Whether Romney now gets this, we won’t know.
What we do know is that after the election, Romney shopped his sorrows away with a brand new, German-designed Audi SUV, assembled in Slovakia.
I can only assume the reasoning behind that purchase–why he chose foreign over domestic–echoes a slogan once used for the Jeep Grand Cherokee: