In his closing argument for his candidate, Mitt Romney’s senior adviser defended a controversial campaign television ad suggesting Chrysler is moving U.S. jobs to China, saying the spot is “accurate” during an interview with Matt Lauer on TODAY Tuesday.
The ad claims that GM is looking to start production of Jeeps in China while also doubling the number of cars it builds in China, implying that it will be shipping 15,000 U.S. jobs overseas. Executives for General Motors and Chrysler have both publicly refuted the claims in the commercial, with a spokesperson for GM calling it “campaign politics at its cynical worst” and saying there are “Hubble telescope-length distances between campaign ads and reality.”
“The ad is accurate, and we stand by it,’’ Romney senior campaign adviser Ed Gillespie told Lauer. “We know that the truth hurts sometimes, but it’s the truth.’’
Chrysler has said it is considering expanding its operations in China only for the Chinese market and that it would have no effect on American jobs. Vice President Joe Biden hammered the ad in speech in the battleground state of Virginia on Monday.
“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China,’’ the narrator in the spot says. “Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.”
“The head of Fiat came out and said that they were going to open production in China for Jeep,’’ Gillespie said. “That’s what the ad says, and that’s accurate. The message of the ad is they are opening production in China.
“Right now the Jeeps that are sold in China are made in the United States. There was an original Bloomberg report that said they were going to close the plant and shift jobs to China. That turned out not to be accurate, but they said they were going to open jobs in China or open production in China. We’re currently shipping to China from the U.S. exporting there. This ad is accurate.”
Romney is out campaigning in Ohio and Pennsylvania on Election Day.
"We have momentum at the end of this campaign,'' Gillespie said. "We see incredible intensity on the part of our voters, and we’re leaving nothing on the field. We’re looking forward to tonight.''
While Romney is campaigning in two battleground states, President Obama will instead conduct satellite interviews in nine battleground states on Tuesday. Obama’s senior campaign adviser, Robert Gibbs, told Savannah Guthrie on TODAY Tuesday that the administration still has progress to make in a potential second term.
“I think we’ve still got a lot of work to do, obviously, to get our economy moving,’’ Gibbs said. “We’ve got to bring more jobs back overseas that are manufacturing jobs."
Gibbs added: “I think each election is a choice. It’s a choice between two very different and competing visions, and I think we wanted to make sure that the American people understood the president’s vision of continuing to build this economy from the middle out and Governor Romney’s vision of tax cuts showered on the wealthy in hopes that somehow that would lift the middle class, despite the fact that that was exactly what got us into this economic calamity.’’
The president also hopes to have a more bipartisan effort to get things accomplished in a second term.
“Each side is going to have to do is work together in order to get things done,’’ Gibbs said. “We’ve got to break this Washington gridlock. We’ve got to break this notion, particularly on the Republican side in Congress, that compromise is a dirty word or somehow if they don’t get everything they want they can’t work at all with this president. I think the president is eager to sit down and solve problems with Democrats and Republicans and move this country forward.’’
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