Mitt Romney is again slamming the White House for its handling of the auto bailout, calling it “crony capitalism on a grand scale” in an op-ed in The Detroit News. And once again, Democrats are responding that if Romney had been in charge, the auto industry would be dead and millions of jobs with it. Lost in all the infighting is this: they pretty much endorsed the same bailout.

“What Obama did is what Romney said would be a good idea,” Edward Altman, a professor of finance at NYU-Stern who testified before Congress during the auto crisis, told TPM. “Both of them deserve a great deal of credit for the turnaround, Obama more than Romney, because Romney just wrote an op-ed and didn’t implement it.”

The problem is Mitt committed so heavily to the no-bailout, anti-intervention rhetoric, that he’s now saddled with being on the wrong side of Detroit’s comeback. It’s the price of shifting with every political wind. You can flip and flop but it’s hard to flip back a third time.