In 2008, GM and Chrysler were not prepared for a Chapter 11 filing. President George W. Bush’s economic advisers studied the firms’ numbers and determined they might be forced to liquidate without a loan. So Bush provided a three-month bridge loan, allowing the automakers time to restructure before entering bankruptcy and giving Obama some time to make his own policy choices. There are valid questions about the way Obama and Steve Rattner structured their auto bailout. But GM and Chrysler did eventually enter a managed bankruptcy, which was the endgame that Romney himself recommended.

Specific bailout policies can be disputed, but one fact cannot: No president — Republican or Democrat — would have allowed the economic collapse of the upper Midwest in the midst of a national economic panic. A conservatism that prefers ideology to reality is not particularly conservative.