Barack Obama wants to change the U.S. auto industry, but his own auto choices keep obscuring his message.

Last May, Obama lectured Detroit’s automakers because they “refuse to make the transition to fuel-efficient production” (not true, actually: 30 percent of GM’s models, for example, get 30 mpg, and GM has been at the forefront of electric-vehicle production for 25 years). Of course, automakers only make what their customers want, and it was soon revealed that Obama himself owned a 21-mpg Chrysler 300C – one of the brand’s biggest, thirstiest, most powerful sedans, cranking out 340 HP from its 5.7-liter Hemi engine.

Caught in his hypocrisy, Obama quickly bought a “green,” 32-mpg hybrid Ford Escape.

His halo restored, Obama has continued to criss-cross the country bashing U.S. automakers for their moral shortcomings. Never mind the fact that he rarely drives himself anywhere, depending instead on a Secret Service-provided fleet of 15-mpg Chevy Suburban SUVs (a fact the press gives him a pass on).

But now those Suburbans are compromising him on second issue: trade.

Campaigning in Ohio this week, Obama folded his standard anti-Detroit message into a larger, anti-NAFTA theme, ripping into the Clinton-signed trade deal that Obama claims has sucked Midwest manufacturing jobs south of the border.

And where is Obama’s Suburban assembled? Silao, Mexico.