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Seems like only yesterday when the American auto industry saw itself threatened by the possibility that the government might insist upon higher mileage standards. Yet now the marketplace is being more insistent than the government ever thought of being.

And so now General Motors is closing the Moraine sport utility vehicle plant.

You have to wonder what would have happened if the government had decided to be a great deal more insistent 20 or 30 years ago.

Yet resistance to higher standards has been intense and eternal. Just a couple of months ago, Mitt Romney was campaigning in Michigan against them. He was going to be, not simply the savior of the industry as it now stands, but the one who restored it to past glory, without anything so nasty as imposed fuel efficiency.

(In that state's presidential primary, he beat John McCain, who had long been more supportive of higher standards than most Republican politicians.)

Last year at roughly this time, the top executives from Detroit were in Washington to testify against the imposition of standards that might be too ambitious. They emphasized how many other problems Detroit already had.

But that season now looks like the good old days.

In the last presidential election, candidates found themselves warned regularly about the dangers of going after gas-guzzlers. "Soccer moms," they were told, loved their great big vehicles, so useful for toting teams and equipment.

For a politician to talk about the need for different kinds of cars was to attack the American way of life. If you did it, you'd be painted as elitist and out of touch.

(Of course, by then it was probably too late to do anything that might have saved the Moraine plant, because much time is necessary for instituting major changes.)

The current presidential campaign has been different, what with gas prices rising. Right about the time the Detroit CEOs were in Washington, Barack Obama and other pols were pushing the higher-mileage cause hard.

You could tell, however, that Obama was a bit abashed about it, more than he should have been.

Worried about being seen as an enemy of the American auto industry, he offered a trade: If you do something about mileage, I'll have the government help you meet those enormously expensive health-care obligations (to your employees and pensioners) that you undertook when times were better.

Hillary Clinton has talked in similar terms and has spoken of helping the industry retool its factories.

When the latest news broke about GM cutbacks — and became the lead story in some national outlets, at least for a while — the Obama campaign was quick:

"Today's news is a painful reminder," it said, "not only of the challenges America faces in our global economy, but of George Bush's failed economic policies....

"(W)e've had an energy policy that funds both sides in the war on terror without promoting fuel efficiency.... That's part of the reason thousands of more Americans in Wisconsin and Ohio will no longer be able to count on a paycheck....

"I've proposed investing $150 billion over 10 years in green energy and creating up to five million new green jobs. We'll finally provide domestic automakers with the funding they need to retool their factories and make fuel-efficient and alternative fuel cars."

It's hard to imagine anybody around here being comforted by any of that. It's also a little hard to imagine that Obama actually believes that what's going on now is Bush's fault, given that the deterioration of the American auto industry just keeps going, under every president.

The doomsayers — the people who insisted all along that we needed to use less energy or face painful crunches someday — have been concentrated in the Democratic Party. But they have been kept out of power during good times, even during Democratic presidencies.

In 2004, a New Jersey newspaper reported this:

"Back in 1997, there was one sport utility vehicle for every 10 New Jersey drivers.... Five years later, the ratio had shrunk to nearly one SUV for every six motorists.... The pool of licensed drivers grew by 2 percent, while the state's collective fleet of SUVs grew by 72 percent."

Suppose you were an American politician — or a GM executive. And you saw what people wanted to drive. And you saw that American auto companies had found at least one niche that worked nicely for them. Would you have bucked that trend?

Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News. He may be reached at 225-2288 or by e-mail at mgottlieb@DaytonDailyNews.com.

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