NOT ROMNEY’S STRONGEST SUBJECT…. He can’t talk about health care. He can’t talk about energy. He can’t talk about social issues. When he tries to talk about national security, it doesn’t go well.
So former Gov. Mitt Romney (R) is sticking to the one issue everyone else should be talking about: jobs.
Sometimes truth arrives from the most unexpected sources. Christina Romer, President Obama’s former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, said last week that she was dismayed at Washington’s lack of focus on jobs.
“I frankly don’t understand why policymakers aren’t more worried about the suffering of real families,” Romer said. “We need to realize that there is still a lot of devastation out there.” She called the 8.9% unemployment rate “an absolute crisis.”
So far, so good. I certainly agreed with Romer’s concerns, so Romney’s op-ed is off to a good start. What else ya got, Mitt?
President Obama didn’t cause the recession, but he made it worse and caused it to last longer. From the outset, he inaugurated the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs policies we have seen since Jimmy Carter.
So much for the promising start.
For one thing, the notion that President Obama made the recession “worse” is truly insane. The economy was hemorrhaging jobs; now it’s gaining jobs. Unemployment was getting worse; now it’s getting better. The economy was contracting; now it’s growing. Every Republican prediction about the White House’s recovery efforts was proven wrong, and all told, the economy added roughly 1.3 million private-sector jobs in 2010 — a little more than the combined net total of the entire Bush/Cheney era.
I would have preferred a more ambitious stimulus, but the fact remains that the president’s policies helped turn the economy around after the failures of the last Republican administration.
Even Mitt Romney should be able to tell the difference between up and down.
For another, there’s Romney’s record. He was governor of Massachusetts for four years, and during that time, his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country.” Adding insult to injury, “By the end of his four years in office, Massachusetts had squeezed out a net gain in payroll jobs of just 1 percent, compared with job growth of 5.3 percent for the nation as a whole.”
How bad is Romney’s record? During his tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in jobs growth. There’s a reason he didn’t seek re-election — Romney was wildly unpopular in his home state.
Maybe this is another issue Romney just shouldn’t talk about.
