Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney today attempted to dismiss criticism of his complicated stance on the rescue of the American auto industry, telling a Colorado radio station that his position has been the same since he first authored a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

Since writing the editorial in 2008, Romney has both attempted to claim credit for the bailout and re-iterated his position that the industry should have been allowed to fail, most recently saying he would “take a lot a credit” for the auto industry’s recent successes. Those positions don’t conflict, though, according to Romney, who said he still has “the same position on the auto bailout” he had in the beginning:

HOST: You’ve certainly been accused of not sticking with one message, the most recent, your comments about the auto bailout.

ROMNEY: Well, actually, I have the same position on the auto bailout I had from the very beginning. I actually wrote about it.

Romney’s attempts to claim credit for the rescue, however, directly conflict with his 2008 editorial, in which he advocated for letting Chrysler and General Motors enter a managed bankruptcy financed by the private sector. “Frankly, that’s finally what the president did,” he said yesterday.

In reality, the auto rescue didn’t follow the plan outlined by Romney. The government stepped in to finance GM and Chrysler’s entries into bankruptcy because the private sector — including Romney’s former private equity firm, Bain Capital — refused to do so. Without the federal government’s bridge loan, Chrysler and GM would have been forced into liquidating, jeopardizing a million jobs and the future of the entire American automotive industry, as auto insiders, experts, and even Romney’s own endorsers have noted.

Faced with that reality, Romney has put on an extraordinary display of contortion, attempting to convince voters that he both opposed the bailout and came up with it at the same time.

Tea Party-backed candidates swept into Washington in 2010 on a wave of opposition to bank bailouts. Now that they’re in Washington, however, their campaigns are drowning in campaign cash provided by the very banks that benefited from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

The 10 freshmen Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee who have Tea Party backing have taken more than $100,000 from the political action committees affiliated with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs — the nation’s five largest banks — Bloomberg reports:

Yet the anti-bailout fervor that drove the messaging of Republican candidates during the campaign cycle of 2009 and 2010 has dissipated, and those same lawmakers are now collecting money from the firms bailed out by President George W. Bush’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. [...]

The political action committees of those institutions have distributed $169,499 through March 31 to the campaign coffers of the 10 freshman Tea Party-backed lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee, according to an analysis of campaign finance disclosure records.

The Tea Party hasn’t succeeded in ending “too big too fail” because they haven’t tried. Though the five biggest banks are now bigger than they were before the financial crisis, the Tea Party members haven’t proposed a single piece of legislation to limit their size. Instead, they’ve focused on repealing financial reform and blocking efforts to protect consumers from Wall Street’s predatory practices.

Multiple Democrats have proposed legislation to cap the size of large banks, while others have proposed new ways to unwind large banks without taxpayer-funded bailouts should they collapse. The efforts have drawn no support from the Tea Party. “No more bailouts,” Tea Party Express’ website proclaims. The candidates it and other Tea Party organizations backed in 2010, however, apparently no longer feel the same way.

For months, Mitt Romney has been dogged by a 2008 New York Times op-ed he wrote entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” But now, the same adviser who claimed Romney’s extreme views wouldn’t matter in the general election because it will be “almost like an Etch a Sketch” is doing some serious Etch a Sketch-shaking of his own.

Romney strongly opposed the “bailout” of General Motors, writing: “If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.” He doubled down on that in February, saying that his “managed bankruptcy” proposals would have been vastly superior to the Obama administration’s “crony capitalism plan.” Now that the federal intervention by the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations has proven a huge success, the Romney campaign is trying desperately to change its tune.

On Saturday, Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom said:

[Romney's] position on the bailout was exactly what President Obama followed. I know it infuriates them to hear that… The only economic success that President Obama has had is because he followed Mitt Romney’s advice. … The fact that the auto companies today are profitable is because they’ve shed costs. The reason they shed those costs and have got their employee labor contracts less expensive is because they went through that managed bankruptcy process. It is exactly what Mitt Romney told them to do.

Fehrnstrom has made the same claim before. “Mitt Romney had the idea first,” he said last May. “Mitt Romney argued that instead of a bailout, we should let the car companies go through a restructuring under the bankruptcy laws.” This, of course, flatly contradicts Romney’s February editorial, in which he wrote of Obama’s efforts: “I believe that without his intervention things there would be better.”

As industry experts have noted, however, exactly following Romney’s plan would have led to the collapse of the auto industry, since the private sector wasn’t willing to lend GM and Chrysler the money they needed to get to managed bankruptcy. “There was no one that was willing to come up not only with the cash to keep them afloat but also to serve the warranties of everyone, you and I that drive all these cars,” Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), a Romney endorser, said in February. “There was no one that could have picked up those pieces other than the federal government.”

As the Republican presidential nominating contest moves to Michigan, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is touting his ties to the state — he was born there and his father is a former governor — and its auto industry. Romney wrote an editorial early this week re-upping his opposition to the 2009 auto rescue that saved Chrysler and General Motors, a sequel to the editorial outlining his original opposition, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

The response to the editorial probably hasn’t gone as Romney hoped. Since it ran in the Detroit News Tuesday, auto industry insiders have repeatedly slammed it as “reckless,” “dishonest,” and “wrong,” noting that Romney either mistakes or ignores some of the basic facts surrounding the rescue. ThinkProgress compiled a sample of the reactions to Romney’s latest view of the rescue:

AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson: As far as Mitt piece in yesterday’s Detroit News it was truly reckless, detached from reality, and dishonest. … Mitt’s assertion that private financing “DIP” was available in fall of ’08 into ’09 is fantasy. Everyone knows we were in the midst of the greatest financial meltdown since the 1930’s. … The catastrophe in ’08 was so calamitous that government actions were necessary to avoid a great depression. Sometimes reality trumps principle and a courageous leader will understand that and will take the leap even when it is dramatically unpopular.

Yahoo! Autos reporter Justin Hyde: “Romney’s take just doesn’t square with the facts as I lived them. … Had the government not intervened as Romney suggests, GM and Chrysler likely would have been liquidated by their Wall Street bondholders. … One auto industry think tank estimated doing so would have led to 1.3 million job losses and threatened Ford, Toyota and other automakers.”

Reuters columnist Paul Ingrassia: “The government bailout was the only way to save GM and Chrysler, and thus was a critical element in preventing the Great Recession from morphing into Great Depression II. … The only alternative to a government bailout was the outright liquidation of both companies. Maybe the U.S. economy could have survived that blow, but maybe not. What’s clear is that it would have been foolhardy to find out.”

The Economist: “The course Mr Romney recommended in 2008 began with the government stepping back, and it is unlikely things would’ve turned out so well had this happened. … The credit markets were bone-dry, making the privately financed bankruptcy that Mr Romney favoured improbable. He conveniently ignores this bit of history in claiming to have been right all along.”

Romney’s view of the bailout isn’t even popular among his best friends in Michigan. Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who endorsed Romney yesterday, chastised Republicans who continue to criticize the bailout last November. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

Two weeks from today, voters in Michigan will hit the polls for the state’s Republican presidential primary, where native son and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney — once thought of as the GOP’s inevitable nominee — is now trailing former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Romney’s father, George Romney, is a former governor of Michigan and was the CEO of the now-defunct American Motor Company, a Detroit-based automaker that was once one of the biggest in the world.

Romney has often played up those ties on the campaign trail — he won Michigan’s primary in 2008 — and attempted to use them to his advantage three years ago when he penned a New York Times editorial titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” The editorial was a response to President Obama’s plan to rescue the American auto industry, and as evidence has emerged that Obama’s rescue plan worked, Romney had attempted to claim that he came up with the idea first.

Ahead of the primary, though, Romney published another editorial on the rescue, this time in the Detroit News, in which he renewed the “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt” call he first made in 2009:

My view at the time — and I set it out plainly in an op-ed in the New York Times — was that “the American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. Instead of a bailout, I favored “managed bankruptcy” as the way forward.

Managed bankruptcy may sound like a death knell. But in fact, it is a way for a troubled company to restructure itself rapidly, entering and leaving the courtroom sometimes in weeks or months instead of years, and then returning to profitable operation. [...]

By the spring of 2009, instead of the free market doing what it does best, we got a major taste of crony capitalism, Obama-style.

In the editorial, Romney, whose former company profited from a government bailout, called on the government to sell its shares in GM and return the profits to taxpayers. In other words, Romney is fine with destroying the company when it isn’t succeeding, but then wants to seize its profits if it turns around.

Meanwhile, he continues to ignore the success of the rescue plan he criticizes. Chrysler posted its first profit more than a decade in last year and expects those profits to continue growing in 2012. It has added 9,400 jobs since its rescue and plans to add 1,600 more at a plant in Illinois this year, and the success of Chrysler and General Motors has helped American automakers control more than half of the industry’s market share. The industry has hired enough workers to make up for all those laid off during the recession, and American and foreign automakers plan to add 167,000 jobs at American plants this year.

Romney isn’t just ignoring facts — he’s also ignoring a Republican who is close to the situation. Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) has warned candidates against criticizing the bailout and touted its success. “I would have had some differences on how they did it, but I’m not going to second-guess it,” Snyder told the New York Times. “The more important thing is the results. And the auto industry is doing very well today.”

President Obama’s plan to rescue Chrysler as part of a broader bailout of the American auto industry in 2008 came under fire from various Republicans who predicted the company would never return to profitability. “The government has forced taxpayers to buy these failing companies without any plausible plan for profitability,” South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint (R) said. Arizona Sen. John McCain (R), meanwhile, said that if “anybody believes Chrysler is going to survive, I’d like to meet them.”

Two years later, though, Chrysler has done just that, posting its first operating profit since the rescue and its first net profit since 1997. Chrysler’s $225 million income, including $183 million in net profits, would have been more than $500 million larger, the company said, had it not decided to retire the debt it owed the U.S. and Canadian governments. CEO Sergio Marchionne said the company’s forecast for 2012 is even better, the New York Times reports:

Mr. Marchionne, who also heads Chrysler’s Italian parent company, Fiat, said the Detroit automaker expected to earn profit of $1.5 billion this year as it continued to introduce products including the Dodge Dart, a new compact car derived from an existing Fiat model.

“The house is in good order,” Mr. Marchionne said in a statement. “Now we greet a new year of high expectations with our heads down, forging ahead and focusing on executing the goals we’ve set for ourselves as a company.”

Chrysler has added 9,400 jobs since the rescue and plans to announce tomorrow that it will add 1,600 more at a plant in Illinois, where it will manufacture the fuel-efficient Dodge Dart. That’s part of an industry-wide hiring spree in the United States, as American and foreign automakers are expected to add nearly 167,000 jobs by 2015. Boosted by strong sales years in both 2010 and 2011, American automakers now control more than half of the United States’ market share.

Of course, the profits and jobs that have come from the renewed success of the American auto industry would not have been possible had Obama followed the advice of Republicans, whose plan to let the companies enter an uncontrolled bankruptcy would have killed as many as 80,000 jobs.