So I go away from my computer for a day and suddenly everybody starts talking about Michigan. I don’t have much to add to the conversation about Henry Ford — he was both a great industrialist who improved the lives of millions and an anti-Semite — but I thought I’d share this quote about him:

Here in Detroit nearly a century ago, as all of you know better than me, Henry Ford set history in motion with the very first assembly line. He built not only a Model T, but a new model for the way America would do business for quite a longwhile. He said he was looking for leaders and thinkers and workers with “an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done.” People like that came together in Detroit and all across America. They forged America’s transition from farm to factory. Detroit led the way and America led the world.

The speaker is Bill Clinton. Democrats who are feigning outrage over Romney’s appearance at the Henry Ford Museum–a great Detroit institution, by the way–should feel free to discuss Clinton’s willingness to use Henry Ford as a rhetorical prop and his failure to condemn Ford’s dark side. Then they should censure the Ford Foundation and declare that no good liberal should accept its grants.

Having said all that, Romney really blew it today. With one line, he could have locked up the Michigan primary right now: He should have called upon Henry Ford’s grandson, William Clay Ford Sr., to sell the Detroit Lions. That would have won a lot of votes. Forty-three years of mediocrity is long enough!