Obama takes credit for Chrysler’s rebound

The president and his allies both seem to believe the rescue of Chrysler and GM is a big part of Obama’s political arsenal, and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) trotted out two former Midwestern governors, Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm (D) and Ohio’s Ted Strickland (D), to acclaim the Chrysler news.

Granholm homed in on former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), a Michigan native, for opposing the bailouts.

“If Mitt Romney and these other Republicans had their way, Michigan families, and Midwestern families, would have been left out in the cold and would have lost their jobs and their way of life,” she said in a DNC conference call. “These voters aren’t going to forget who stood with them when needed it.”

The DNC also released a video on Tuesday morning attacking Romney and other Republicans for opposing the bailout.

“President Obama spent billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to bailout the auto industry,” said Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Romney’s presidential exploratory committee. “Mitt Romney argued that instead of a bailout, we should let the car companies go through a restructuring under the protection of the bankruptcy laws. This is the course the Obama administration eventually followed. If they had done it sooner, as Mitt Romney suggested, the taxpayers would have saved a lot of money.”

But The White House omitted one item the Treasury Department had in its initial release: The U.S. won’t likely recover its outstanding $1.9 billion investment in Chrysler.

Cross-posted from Blog Briefing Room. Updated at 2:16 p.m.