The campaign is trying to repaint Romney as the one and only candidate for the auto industry:
Travis Waldron has a refresher on the ad's bankruptcy rhetoric:
Obama did take both companies into a managed bankruptcy, the path Romney says was originally his idea. Romney, however, supported private sector financing of the bankruptcy, a plan that was "pure fantasy" at the time since no private lenders could lend to the companies in the middle of the financial crisis. Without federal intervention, the companies would have almost assuredly collapsed, costing 1.3 million jobs, according to industry estimates.
Sam Stein parses the ad's other claims:
[T]he ad accuses Obama of selling "Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China." Again, this is technically true, but only according to a narrow reading of the language. Fiat, the Italian company that now owns Chrysler, is building Jeeps in China. But the company is not moving jobs from America to do it. Instead, Fiat is expanding current production in China for the purposes of catering to a growing Chinese market.
Where the ad goes from misleading to something more nefarious is in the text it shows. At one point, it displays a line from a Bloomberg story stating that Chrysler "plans to return Jeep output to China," the implication being that the company is moving operations there as opposed to expanding operations that are already there. Romney has cited this report on several occasions while campaigning and has been summarily criticized for doing so.
Kevin Drum adds:
Romney's ad rates about 9 out of 10 on the deceptiveness scale. He's obviously trying to imply that American jobs will be shipped overseas; stating things accurately would require wholesale revisions; and doing so would completely destroy Romney's point. But he doesn't care. He's got an election to win, and if scaring Ohio autoworkers is what it takes, then that's what it takes. It's truly nauseating.
Jonathan Cohn sees Romney's last-minute auto-industry makeover as a sign of desperation:
The auto industry rescue was a huge, complex undertaking. Reasonable people can quibble with individual decisions the president and his advisers made, whether it was which dealerships to close, what concessions to demand from unions, or how much to pay different bondholders. And it'd be nice if Chevy started selling a few more Volts. But overall the rescue has been a success, particularly when it came to saving and creating jobs. As Greg Sargent put it the other day, "Obama got it right on the auto bailout, and Romney got it wrong." That reality helps explain why Obama has held a slim but persistent lead in the Ohio polls—and why Romney will say just about anything to confuse the issue.
The Dish 