Mayor Rahm Emanuel won’t just be raising money for President Obama’s re-election. He’s also a campaign attack dog. Now that Mitt Romney is the presumptive Republican nominee, the mayor is taking a bite out of him on Piers Morgan Tonight.
In an interview aired last week., Emanuel criticized Romney for his opposition to an auto industry bailout in 2008. (Romney wrote a New York Times Op-ed entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.")
Here’s the exchange from a clip on CNN’s website:
MORGAN: “Has he been frustrated, do you think, that he can’t force the rate of change as much as he’d like to?”
EMANUEL: “I’m not going to speak for him. You have to do that. You have a political system that needs to measure up to the challenges we have, and measures up to the greatness of the people of this country, and, does he want change? Yes. And he wants change in a direction that helps the middle class. I would say, clearly, Mitt Romney’s economic policies want to take us to a point in time which actually led to this crisis we had, both in the auto industry, the financial sector, and the economy as a whole. Remember, if it was up to Mitt Romney, we wouldn’t have an auto industry. He said, ‘Let ’em go. President Obama said, ‘Absolutely not. I’m going to double down on the American worker. And whose policies was right for that industry is also who’s right for this country.”
Of course, Emanuel was no fan of an auto industry bailout. As White House Chief of Staff, he asked the administration’s auto industry rescue team, “Why even save GM?” When reminded that saving GM would save the jobs of tens of thousands of autoworkers, Emanuel responded, “F--- the UAW.”
Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Emanuel.
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