Factcheck has done a little looking into two attack ads released by the McCain campaign, and they dont’t like what they see. The ads — one radio, and one internet — attack Romney’s healthcare proposal that was signed into law in Massachusetts as well as his proposition for helping the auto industry.

The announcer in the ad says that Romney promised $20 billion to Detroit “to bail out the auto industry on the back of taxpayers.” But that $20 billion was what Romney proposed as a “national investment in energy research.” Here’s Romney at a Jan. 14 speech to the Detroit Economic Club:

Romney (Jan. 14, 2008): If we’re going to be the world’s greatest economic power, we also have to invest in the future. It’s time for us to be bold. I will make a five-fold increase – from $4 billion to $20 billion – in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology. Let’s invest in our future.

Perhaps to McCain’s ears that’s a bail out. But the senator has been a strong proponent of pursuing alternative energies in the past – so strong that he proposed the improbable goal of making the country “oil independent” within five years. We didn’t let that claim go unchecked, either.

 Of course, there’s already been much discussion about McCain’s misleading attack over the weekend on Romney’s position on the surge. One of the most brutal is that of George Will:

[Clinton’s] was a garden-variety dishonesty, the manufacture of which does not cause a Clinton in midseason form to break a sweat. And it was no worse than — actually, not as gross as — St. John of Arizona’s crooked-talk claim in Florida that Mitt Romney wanted to “surrender and wave a white flag, like Senator Clinton wants to do” in Iraq because Romney “wanted to set a date for withdrawal that would have meant disaster.”

Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Clintons should bask in the glow of John McCain’s Clintonian gloss on this fact: Ten months ago Romney said that President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki should discuss, privately, “a series of timetables and milestones.” That unremarkable thought was twisted by McCain, whose distortions are notably clumsy, as when Romney said, accurately, that he alone among the candidates has had extensive experience in private-sector business. That truth was subjected to McCain’s sophistry, and he charged that Romney had said “you haven’t had a real job” if you had a military career. If, this autumn, voters must choose between Clinton and McCain, they will face, at least stylistically, an echo, not a choice.
But that dreary scenario need not come to pass. Romney seems to have found his voice as attention turns to the economy, a subject on which McCain seems neither conversant nor eager to become so. And in South Carolina, Obama, more than doubling Clinton’s 27 percent, won a majority of the votes, becoming the first person in either party to do so in a contested primary this year. He won a majority of men and of women, which pretty much covers the rainbow of genders. And he used his victory speech to clearly associate the Clintons with “the idea that it’s acceptable to say anything and do anything to win an election” (hello again, Bill, you political ethicist who famously said “you gotta do what you gotta do”) and “the kind of partisanship where you’re not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea — even if it’s one you never agreed with.”
Obama is running against two Clintons — or one and a fraction of one, given how much she has been diminished by her overbearing spouse. Romney is marginally better off running against a Clinton impersonator.

Hat Tip: Captain’s Quarters