Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) has faced scrutiny from his fellow Republican candidates over his career at Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that, despite his retirement, still pays him millions of dollars a year. Bain, and Romney, often raked in profits while companies were shedding jobs, as was the case in New Hampshire and South Carolina, among others.
Anticipating that Democrats and President Obama would pick up on those attacks, Romney told Politico last week how he plans to respond. Apparently, his plan is to toss around blatant falsehoods, as he told reporters that Obama “has not created any new jobs” as president:
“I know that the Democrats will try and make this a campaign about Bain Capital; … 25 million people are out of work because of Barack Obama. And so I’ll compare my experience in the private sector where, net-net, we created over 100,000 jobs.”
“I’ll compare that record with his record, where he has not created any new jobs.”
Of course, like Romney’s repeated assertions that Obama made the economy “worse,” the claim that he hasn’t created any new jobs is false. As Steve Benen noted, the private sector has added 2.3 million new jobs since March 2010, and it took the Obama economy one year to create more jobs than the economy under President Bush did in eight. There are, indeed, fewer net jobs now than when Obama took office early in the recession, but his policies, including the stimulus, effectively turned months of job losses into months of consistent job gains.
Many of the jobs lost under Obama — more than 600,000, to be exact — are public sector jobs, the type Romney considers outside “the real economy.” And while he touts his own business success, Romney has promised to slash even more public sector jobs, doing to government employees what his former company has done to thousands of workers.
Along with distorting Obama’s record, Romney is distorting his own. While he claims his record includes plenty of job creation, he ignores his time as governor of Massachusetts. From 2003 to 2007, in fact, the state ranked 47th in job creation. Romney also refuses to provide evidence to back up the claim that Bain created 100,000 jobs on his watch. Romney may want to talk about jobs, but without adding distortions and baseless claims, his record sure doesn’t appear like something worth touting.
by Michael Conathan
