Signs Of Life At Romney's Michigan Rallies
ST. JOSEPH, MICH. -- His campaign may be on the ropes, but Mitt Romney was clearly feeding off of the enthusiastic crowds he drew in stops across Michigan today. Though there were no more than a few hundred people at any one of his events, Romney was received like a favorite son in Traverse City and St. Joseph, where rallies there drew some of the more boisterous crowds that Romney has seen in weeks.
The former Massachusetts governor, himself a Michigan native, clearly fed off the strong reception he received from the crowd of about 300 at the Berrien County Republicans event in St. Joseph tonight, where he gave his optimistic vision even more prominence than he usually does.
"Jimmy Carter had all sorts of concerns about America and the American spirit and so forth, and then Ronald Reagan came along and said we're the greatest nation on earth," Romney said. "We're the greatest people on earth. We're a good people. We're a shining city on a hill. He lifted our eyes. He inspired us. He gave us optimism again. That's the first thing a president's got to do, which is to remind the American people that we don't apologize for who we are. We stand for greatness and we always will."
Romney continued to call for a reexamination of energy efficiency standards, which he said have unfairly hurt the automobile industry in the state.
"If we're going to have caps, for instance, on CO2, it shouldn't just be America with the burden being placed on American jobs and American employers—it should be global," Romney said. "And we're not gonna say we're gonna put pressures here on Michigan to make it hard to manufacture cars or anything else for that matter in America and then say to the Chinese, 'Oh, you just go ahead and build a new coal power plant every week.'"