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Feb 17, 2012, 04:37 AM EST | Alexander Burns at Politico wrote:NOVI, Mich. — Remember the good old days, when America was great and Detroit was the beating heart of a powerful industrial Midwest?
Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum do.
At the height of a 2012 campaign fought over starkly different visions of 21st century America, the Republican presidential primary has suddenly taken a different course in Michigan. Here, the top candidates are competing less over who has a superior plan for the future than over who can more compellingly play upon Michiganders’ nostalgia.
For Romney, that means waxing sentimental about his family’s storied Michigan history — reminding voters of an earlier moment when his dad, George Romney, was a titan in the booming auto industry and the governor of a prosperous state. Santorum lacks Romney’s ancestral ties to the Feb. 28 primary battleground but makes up for it by emphasizing his working-class roots and a campaign platform fixed on reviving the depressed U.S. manufacturing sector.
On a certain level, it’s a campaign that matches the state: Michigan and its cherished auto industry have been in a depressing cycle of government bailouts, job losses, factory closings and more bailouts for decades now. But complicating matters for Republicans is that Michigan’s present is looking up a little after General Motors posted its largest profit this week — after a federal bailout both Romney and Santorum opposed.
That’s only part of the reason it’s apparently more appealing for the Republicans to stump on gauzy imagery from a bygone era.
The two men are wooing Michiganders in unabashedly emotional terms — a notable departure from earlier contests, during which Romney’s economic bromides and his opponents’ strident ideological rhetoric defined the debate. Now, the more prominent contrast is between Romney’s lofty Michigan political lineage and Santorum’s tightly embraced Rust Belt identity as the grandson of a coal miner. Santorum’s pledge to revive the manufacturing sector is a core part of his campaign platform.
“A little history: I was born and raised here. I love this state. It seems bright here. Trees are the right height. I like seeing the lakes,” Romney said at the top of his remarks at a Chamber of Commerce event in Farmington Hills on Thursday. “I love cars. I grew up totally in love with cars. It used to be, in the ’50s and ’60s, if you showed me 1 square foot of almost any part of the car, I could tell you what brand it was — the model and so forth.”
He continued: “Now, with all the Japanese cars, I’m not quite so good at it. But I still know American cars pretty well.”
Romney’s the-way-we-were message is one his campaign has projected on television, too, airing an ad this week showing the candidate behind the wheel of a car, talking about having gone with his dad to the Detroit Auto Show.
“How in the world did an industry and its leaders get in such a fix that they lost jobs, that they lost their future?” Romney asks in the commercial.
Santorum doesn’t have a Michigan upbringing to recall — though he told attendees at the Oakland County Lincoln Day Dinner in Novi that his immigrant grandfather had “worked in the auto factories for two years” before losing his job, returning to Italy and ultimately ending up in the Pennsylvania coal mines.
Instead, Santorum answers Romney’s personal reminiscences with discourses on the heyday of “the industrial heartland of America,” as he put it here. And Santorum, too, has fond memories of a happier time in the Rust Belt — a time, he says, when families were strong and work had dignity.
“We have a manufacturing sector, when I was growing up, that was 21 percent of the workforce. It’s now 9,” Santorum said in a speech at the Detroit Economic Club. “When I grew up in the steel towns of western Pennsylvania — Butler, Pennsylvania, I mentioned my grandfather was a coal miner — I knew that was the wealth. It wasn’t great wealth. It wasn’t opulent wealth, but it was wealth that was sustaining of families.”
He later told Republicans in Oakland County: “You helped build America. You helped create wealth. You moved people. You created opportunities by what you built here. It’s amazing what you’ve contributed to the greatest country in the history of the world. You’re not done building.”
Taken together, the Republicans’ rhetoric is enough to recall the 1996-vintage mockery Democrats directed at GOP nominee Bob Dole after he offered himself as a “bridge to a time of tranquility, faith and confidence in action.” His foes said Dole was offering a bridge to the past.
Dave Brandt, a former Chrysler employee and Romney supporter who heard the former governor speak Thursday, shrugged at Romney’s professed love for the state and suggested he had “smoothing over” to do when it comes to having opposed the auto bailout.
“I knew of George Romney when he was at American Motors, but not really,” said Brandt, who owns several small businesses. “The point, and he recognizes it, is that automotive [manufacturing] is a big backbone of this country. … I think he’s also playing to the audience.”
Other Michigan primary voters who have heard the candidates’ soft-focus sales pitches have come away less than fully persuaded. Christopher Navarre, who attended Santorum’s Novi speech, called him the most inspiring GOP candidate since Ronald Reagan. But he said the Midwestern revivalism rhetoric didn’t do much to draw him to the former senator.
“It might with some. It doesn’t to me,” he said. “To me, it’s all about the core values and core principles.”
Maria Kruse, a Farmington resident who’s undecided in the race but impressed by Romney, said she could identify with “the memories of being in an automotive-rich state that provides a lot of jobs and industry for the entire country.”
Still, after seeing Romney speak Thursday, she added: “He doesn’t necessarily tap into my emotions from that shared experience.”
Despite their backward-looking remarks, both Romney and Santorum actually do have policy prescriptions for what ails Michigan — though neither has backed away from his original opposition to the auto bailouts.
Romney has endorsed right-to-work policies forbidding mandatory union membership being pushed in the Michigan Legislature and, appearing with Gov. Rick Snyder on Thursday, praised the Republican’s successful push to eliminate a major tax on businesses. Santorum, meanwhile, has campaigned since before the Iowa caucuses on a proposal to slash taxes on manufacturing companies and provide incentives for companies to move industrial assets back to the United States. He billed his proposal in Oakland County as an “economic plan that included everybody” — including “folks who seem to be paddling alone in our society.”
What’s more, any upbeat messaging — backward- or forward-looking — may very well be drowned out in the coming days by a costly paid-media campaign that has already turned negative. As of Thursday night, Romney and the super PAC supporting him had reserved a total of $3.2 million in airtime on Michigan television and radio while Santorum and his super PAC had booked $1.1 million in TV ads over a shorter period of time, according to a media-buying source.
So the nostalgia bidding war between Romney and Santorum may very well devolve into something cruder, with barbs about Santorum’s Senate earmarks and Romney’s Massachusetts health care law quickly replacing the Bedford Falls-like tone of the race here.
Republican Senate candidate Clark Durant, the former head of a charter-schools organization, said that in any case it would be a “mistake” for the candidates to underemphasize their plans for the future for the sake of sharing fond memories.
“I think it is very healthy that we are going to see a lively conversation between two very good men,” Durant said as he greeted voters at Novi’s Suburban Collection Showplace, where the Lincoln Dinner was held. “The focus has to be: lay out your vision and how you’re going to get there.”
The candidates, Durant said, should “stop focusing on yesterday and start focusing on tomorrow.”
Juana Summers contributed to this report.
