Ohio Gov. Kasich: 'I'm not going to talk about' Romney's stance on auto bailout

By Keith Laing - 12/01/11 11:26 AM ET

Democrats have made it clear they want to make Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s opposition to the administration's bailouts for automakers an issue in Midwestern states but GOP Ohio Gov. John Kasich is steering clear of the controversy.

Kasich, who was elected in the Tea Party-fueled Republican wave, said in an interview with CNN that while he's glad the American auto companies are doing well, he doesn't "have any interest in even commenting on" Romney's position on the federal assistance given to Chrysler and General Motors.

"I am not going to talk about Mitt Romney," he said in the interview. "It's not important to me what he said or might have said."

In the fall of 2008, Romney wrote a widely read op-ed in The New York Times titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” In it, the former Massachusetts governor argued that helping the companies when they were on the verge of going bankrupt would be worse for them in the long run than the consequences of bankruptcy itself.

“If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye,” Romney wrote. “It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.”

Kasich said in the interview that he was not interested in rehashing the history of the bailout.

"I think there isn't a single person that I know that didn't want to have a strong auto industry in America," Kasich said. "It's just a matter of how you get there."

"What's done is done," he added. "We have a strengthening auto industry in Ohio. And I am very pleased about it. I am pleased for the families of workers who have jobs."

Kasich is in Orlando, Fla., this week for the Republican Governors Association (RGA) meeting.

Last month, one of his counterparts in the RGA, Michigan Gov. Rick Synder, said the GOP would have a hard time winning the argument about the auto bailouts.

"I wouldn't spend a ton of time trying to reconstruct," Synder said in an interview with MSNBC. "History is easy to go back and look at. If you looked at when it was transpiring, the way I viewed it, it wasn't about an individual company. If we were talking about an individual company situation, that's what bankruptcy is there for, and that shouldn't be interfered with."

Democrats have argued that President Obama’s decision to help the auto companies will be popular in Michigan and other Rust Belt swing states. Republicans have generally been unanimous in their opposition to federal bailouts, but Romney was by far the most vocal at the time.