Romney's Record Is Too Poor To Run On

The picture above (from Think Progress) shows a very telling statistic. While 70% of President Obama's ads have been positive ads, the same is not true of his opponent. Over 73% of the ads for Willard Mitt Romney (aka Wall Street Willie) have been negative ads attacking the president. The reason for this is pretty obvious.

While the president has not been able to do everything he wanted to do (largely because of the Republican obstructionism), he has been able to put together a pretty respectable list of accomplishments (health care reform, Lily Ledbetter Act for fair pay, Wall Street reform, stimulus bill, tax cut for working Americans, etc.). In other words, the president has a very respectable record that he can run on.

The same is not true of Romney. During his tenure at Bain Capital, he was far more a job destroyer than a job creator -- and the money he made was for only a few rich men. But it cannot be said that he improved the country or its economy. And during his term as governor of Massachusetts, he had an even worse record. Think Progress has a list of 5 facts about the Massachusetts economy under the governorship of Romney. Here is that list (of what has to be considered failures):

1) Its job growth was poor: Despite Romney’s professed expertise in creating jobs, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job growth during his time as governor. The state’s total job growth was just 0.9 percent, well behind other high-wage, high-skill economies in New York (2.7), California (4.7), and North Carolina (7.6). The national average, meanwhile, was better than 5 percent.


2) Its labor force declined: Only Louisiana, which was ravaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, saw a bigger decline in its labor force than Massachusetts during Romney’s tenure as governor. That decline largely explains the state’s decreasing unemployment rate (from 5.6 to 4.7 percent) while Romney was in office, according to Northeastern University economics professor Andrew Sum. At the same time, the nation as a whole added 8 million people to the labor force.


3) It lost manufacturing jobs at twice the national rate: Massachusetts lost 14 percent of its manufacturing jobs during Romney’s time in office, according to Sum. The loss was double the rate that the nation as a whole lost manufacturing jobs. In 2004, Romney vetoed legislation that would have banned companies doing business with the state from outsourcing jobs to other countries.


4) It was “below average,” “often near the bottom”: “There was not one measure where the state did well under his term in office. We were below average and often near the bottom,” Sum told the Washington Post in February. As a result, the state was more comparable to Rust Belt states like Illinois, Michigan, and Ohio than it was to other high-tech economies it typically competes with.


5) It piled on more debt than any state: Romney left Massachusetts residents with $10,504 in per capita bond debt, the highest of any statein the nation when he left office in 2007. The state ranked second in debt as a percentage of personal income. Romney regularly omits those statistics from his Massachusetts record, instead touting the fact that he balanced the state’s budget (he was constitutionally required to do so). He wouldn’t be much different as president: his proposed tax plan adds more than $10 trillion to the national debt.