Speaking at a shuttered National Gypsum plant in Lorain, Ohio, Thursday, Mitt Romney claimed that “had the president’s economic plans worked, [the factory] would be open right now.”
Never mind the fact that the plant actually closed in 2008, under President George W. Bush. Romney’s assertion, though, was an accurate summation of his own campaign narrative: No matter what happened before Jan. 20, 2009, the state of the economy is Obama’s fault.
The attack Romney laid out in his speech — meant as a rebuttal to Obama’s stop in the same town one day earlier — came down to two main points. The first, on which Romney has staked his campaign, is that the blame for the economy lies squarely with Obama. Polls show that voters are getting on board with Romney’s claim that he knows how to turn the economy around.
To emphasize his point, Romney again recalled Obama’s 2008 convention speech in Denver, and insisted that Obama has not lived up to the promise of progress the president laid out almost four years ago. “He said progress in his view would be measured by good jobs and the ability to pay for a mortgage with a good job,” Romney said. “Well now against that standard of success, how’s he done?”
Obama was talking more broadly about the nature of success than setting his own guidelines.
“Well, we now have about 24 million Americans out of work, or stopped looking for work or underemployed,” Romney said. “By his own measure, he has failed. He has not created more jobs for the American people. He hasn’t, and I will.”
Romney is well aware that Obama gave that speech just before the economy spun out of control in the fall of 2008 and was hemorrhaging jobs at 750,000 per month when Obama took office. He’s also aware that the economy has added over 3 million jobs under Obama.
But because he has staked his candidacy on his claim that he is better-equipped to handle the economy, he has been dismissive of the economic circumstances under which Obama took office. Along those lines, Romney repeated his claim that under President Obama, women have shouldered 93 percent of all jobs lost.
“Now they point out, among the Democrats, well but the jobs lost at the beginning of the recession, during the Bush years, those were largely men, so it balances out,” Romney said. “Oh but don’t forget, had he turned this economy around, like he proposed he would do in a progressing presidency, we wouldn’t have had these additional years of recession with more and more women losing their jobs.”
But Romney has to win on the economy, and to do that he continues to push a fictional version of Obama’s presidency in which all of Obama’s preferred policies were enacted and the Great Recession persisted anyway.
In attacking Obama on the economy, Romney also dug in on another theme — likeability. He suggested that in refusing to take responsibility for the still-struggling economy, Obama is acting dishonorably.
One major area where Romney suffers in the polls is on questions about personality. Call it his “likeability gap.” In fact, it’s such a problem that Romney and other Republicans have to take time out of their attacks on Obama to acknowledge that he’s well-liked. “Even if you like Barack Obama, we can’t afford Barack Obama,” Romney said Wednesday. But on Thursday, Romney suggested people who do like the president are being misled.
“One of the things I find most disappointing in this president,” said Romney, is “his lack of willingness to take responsibility himself for his own failures. He laid out what the standards of success would be, and he has failed to meet them. Why does he continue to attack fellow Americans? To find someone else to blame?”
Romney’s economic attack is integral to his personal attack on Obama. Romney insisted that if given the chance, he would live up to the expectations where Obama has fallen short.
“If I’m president of the United States, with your help, I will tell the truth, I will live with integrity and provide honor in the White House.”
