Romney Chrysler ad needed a phone call - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports

Romney Chrysler ad needed a phone call

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Six days to go before the presidential election and one ad about Chrysler and China, that is aimed at Toledo, is causing a stir.

"Mitt, Mitt, Mitt, Mitt"

At his highly charged Defiance, Ohio appearance, last Thursday, Mitt Romney appealed to voters as the man who will fight for American jobs and said this:

"I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in Ohio, Jeep, now owned by the Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China."

This is the Bloomberg.com story which left the impression Jeep was moving production to China.

In the lead paragraph it say, "Chrysler... plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country."


"Who would do more for the automotive industry."

The Romney camp quickly produced this ad....


"Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to the Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China."

But Romney's camp should have done the legwork that 13abc's Jeep Beat reporter Lissa Guyton did.

She actually spoke with Chrysler and the company insisted Jeep would *expand* into China... not *abandon* Toledo.  A spokesman told Guyton,  "To be clear, Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China".

Chrylser stopped building Jeeps in China in 2007 when the German company Daimler sold the automaker to Cerberus.

In January of this year, the head of Fiat, which now owns Chrysler, said the company wants to get back into China.  Sergio Marchionne told the media at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, "The big opportunity for us in the Chinese environment is to explore how we can grow Jeep because Jeep, to me, is the biggest calling card that we own."

"After Romney's false claim about outsourcing jobs to China"

The Obama camp pounced, producing this response ad arguing Romney got the story wrong.

"The truth: Chrysler's adding jobs in Ohio"

Jeep is spending $550 million dollars in expanding its Toledo production facilities and adding 1100 jobs.

Tuesday, Sergio Marchionne emphatically declared in an email to employees that "Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China."


The Romney camp is not backing down saying Jeeps will be made in China... and that's true, but on the heels of the Romney comment in Defiance, the ad is careless and grossly misleading.

Wednesday, vice president Joe Biden called the Romney ad an "outrageous lie".

We don't go that far...

But the Obama ad rightly calls-out the Romney camp.

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