Tales from the Trail

Michigan’s upcoming GOP presidential primary lends itself to automotive analogies. So here’s one. If Mitt Romney were a car, he’d be the Mitt-subishi Eclipse.

That might well be the upshot of Romney’s op-ed in the Detroit News this week deriding the 2009 automotive bailout as “crony capitalism” and calling it a sop to the United Auto Workers union for supporting President Barack Obama’s campaign. Romney wins points here for courage and consistency (he has taken this position before), but not for political smarts or judgment.

Romney has found himself in the shaky position of defending Romneycare, the government-financed healthcare plan in Massachusetts, while criticizing the government-financed rescue of GM and Chrysler. It’s hard to see a consistent political philosophy in this, which is why conservatives don’t trust Romney. It’s also hard to understand why, on the eve of Michigan’s critical primary, Romney is criticizing the only Obama domestic-policy initiative that actually has worked.

Not surprisingly, the $81 billion bailout was, and remains, wildly popular in Michigan. But on a more fundamental level, the government bailout was the only way to save General Motors and Chrysler, and thus was a critical element in preventing the Great Recession from morphing into Great Depression II.

Recall that in November 2008, the month Obama was elected, the U.S. economy shed 533,000 jobs, the biggest monthly job loss in more than 30 years. That jolted George W. Bush, a Republican, into action. The first $25 billion in government bailout money was approved by the Bush administration before Obama took office.

For a $100 donation, this free poster of Newt Gingrich and his conservative “Dream Team” can be yours.

The poster — featuring the Republican presidential candidate flanked by endorsers of his White House bid  — was offered to supporters Tuesday in a new fundraising appeal.

The Dream Team photo was unveiled at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington last week. The Gingrich campaign said it was hit, and now conservatives across the  country are clamoring for a copy of their own.

You’ve heard about the income divide and the digital divide. Now, get ready for the postal divide.

Nearly 80 percent of the 3,830 U.S. post offices slated for closure later this year are in sparsely populated areas where poverty rates are higher than the national average, according to our findings in the special report “Towns go dark with post office closings.”

One-third of them fall in areas with limited or no wired broadband Internet, leaving 1.7 million people in the lurch. One of them is Carlos Sandoval, a rancher in Trinchera, Colorado, who relies on his post office for everything except groceries.

Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any for China and the United States to work on the kinks in their relationship.

Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping signaled beforehand that tending to the state of the  “dynamic and promising” U.S.-China connection would be the at the heart of his White House visit on Tuesday.

The economic and trade relationship between the two countries is far too important to be frayed by “frictions and differences,” Xi wrote in a Q&A submitted to the Washington Post and published on the eve of his White House meeting with President Barack Obama.

By Warren Strobel

Maybe it’s the careful, consensus-oriented system that produces them, but China’s leaders in recent years have not exactly exuded personality. President Hu Jintao is famous for his stiff manner and scripted speaking style. Jiang Zemin was slightly more relaxed, and enjoyed showing off his English language skills and knowledge of U.S. history.

Washington on Tuesday will get its first close look at China’s next president, current Vice President Xi Jinping, who has a reputation for being more open and refreshingly direct than some of his predecessors. It may be too much to hope for a “Deng Xiaoping moment,” a 1979 turning point in Sino-American cultural relations when the diminutive Deng, China’s great modernizer, attended a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, donned a giant cowboy hat and wowed the crowd. Deng was then China’s vice premier.

Xi has conflicting needs on this visit. He wants to show peers and the public back home that he can handle the American account, China’s most important relationship. He visited Iowa in 1985 and, by all accounts, the experience affected him. He also wants to strike a good working relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill, which could help both sides handle a daunting array of disagreements: human rights, the South China Sea, China’s currency, and Obama’s more aggressive posture in Asia, to name a few.

It’s an anti-Romney movement five years in the making, and now it’s a large and growing “Super Pack” that even plans to crash the legendary Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show this week.

Dogs Against Romney is an ad-hoc group that likes dogs (and even, when pressed, some cats) but does not like Mitt Romney. It was brought together by the now well-known story of how Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, once drove from Boston to Canada with his dog in a carrier strapped to the roof of the speeding family car.

For those unfamiliar, the story –- unearthed by the Boston Globe in 2007 — goes something like this: In 1983 Romney, then a rising star in the private equity world, loaded up the family station wagon with sons and luggage for a long trek from Boston to Ontario, Canada. Seamus, the family’s Irish Setter, was put in his dog crate and strapped to the top of the car. Poor Seamus, whether terrified or over-excited or just not given a chance for a potty break, at some point soiled himself, as the Romney boys discovered when they saw brown liquid running down the window. Romney, the turnaround and efficiency specialist, quickly pulled into a nearby gas station to hose down the car, and the dog, and get back on the road.

Republican presidential contender Rick Santorum on Sunday called recent attacks by his rival Mitt Romney “desperate,” as the two face off in an increasingly contentious battle to become the party’s White House nominee.

Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania and social conservative known for his staunch positions on abortion and gay marriage, is competing to be the conservative alternative to Romney, who faces resistance from Republicans skeptical of moderate stances he took when he was governor of the liberal state of Massachusetts.

Asked about Romney’s recent efforts to highlight times when Santorum sided with Democrats while in Congress, including votes to raise the federal debt ceiling, Santorum appeared amused.

Republican Mitt Romney found it was not all smooth sailing in Maine on Friday night when he was heckled repeatedly at a town hall meeting in Portland at a marine storage and repair facility.

Romney jetted in from Washington to fire up his base a day before the Maine Republican Party announces the results of a week-long caucusing process. But the well-attended meeting wasn’t without some unexpected drama that showed the candidate’s testy side.

The event’s second question centered on “stashing your money away in Cayman Islands,” based on investment strategies revealed when Romney recently released his 2010 tax returns. “ First of all, first of all, I’ll have to take a look at what the trustee says,” Romney said, adding that his fortune — estimated to be as high as $250 million — has been managed in a blind trust for ten years.

Forcing religious organizations to provide contraceptives has nothing to do with women’s rights, Republican presidential contender and vocal Catholic Rick Santorum said on Thursday.

The comment aligned Santorum with a lineup of conservative critics bashing Democratic President Barack Obama’s rule requiring religious institutions — but not churches — to provide health insurance plans that cover birth control.

The rule, announced in January, covers religious-affiliated groups like charities, hospitals and universities. The Catholic Church opposes most methods of birth control and conservatives have painted the rule as an attack on religious freedom from a secular president.

It was a long slog to the government’s mortgage abuse settlement with top banks, one in which officials slept in their offices and worked round the clock. And yet, a consumer advocate looking out for those who lost homes to foreclosure can only muster an “it’s okay.”

You don’t need an expert to tell you how little of a dent the $25 billion deal makes in a mortgage morass that President Obama reminded us is one of the biggest drags on the economy. It took 16 months to get to a settlement that helps roughly 1 million borrowers, while 11 million Americans owe more money that what their homes are worth. People who lost their homes to foreclosures will get payments of $2,000. Home prices, meanwhile, are still 33 percent lower than 2006.

It’s a lot of work for a little relief. But if there is one constituent that walks away satisfied it has to be the state of California. Attorney General Kamala Harris held out for a better deal right to the end. What she won was 45 percent of the settlement spoils, and she only came to the table with a third of the nation’s foreclosures in her portfolio. It pays to play hard to get.