•  Campaign Videos (June 2012) « Obama for America
  

[Music]  Stephanie Cutter: Hi, I'm Stephanie Cutter, deputy campaign manager at Obama for America.  I wanted to record a quick video for you because the Romney campaign's entire message this week is based on a double standard that we can't let them get away with.

First, some context.  Mitt Romney had a lousy jobs record as governor of Massachusetts.  That's a fact.  Under his leadership the state fell to 47th out of 50 states in job creation.  Now, they're having a hard time explaining this so over the weekend they came up with a new way of judging Romney's economic record.  Listen to Romney senior advisor Ed Gillespie:

Gillespie (on FOX News): "You take the first year, which is low base year when the governor came in and took office ... and they're averaging out over the four years, so they're bringing down the gains of his fourth year in office which shows the real impact of his policies, and diluting it with the first year in office, when he came into office and it was 50th in job creation."

Stephanie Cutter: In other words, they're saying don't hold Mitt Romney accountable for the first three years he was in office because he inherited a bad economy, even though the national recession ended a year before Mitt Romney was even elected.

Now they use a different standard for assessing President Obama's record.  We know the president inherited an economy exponentially worse that what Mitt Romney inherited.  Yet these same people blame people blame the president for job losses that occurred in January of 2009, the very month he was inaugurated and months before any of his policies took place.  The hypocrisy is breathtaking, even for Romney. 

But let's play it out a little bit.  If we adopt this new standard then the Romney campaign should judge the president's economic record on the 4.3 million private sector jobs he's created since our economy began to recover just over a year from when the president took office.  

[CHART: Monthly Private Sector Job Growth]

And even if the comparison wasn't entirely hypocritical, President Obama is still creating more jobs than Gov. Romney ever did.

[CHART: Jobs Created in Massachusetts During First 39 Months in Office]

Take a look at the first 39 months of each of their terms, which is where we are right now in President Obama's term.  At this point President Obama has created five times more jobs in Massachusetts than Romney did as governor.

So the bottom line here is simple.  Romney has undercut his core argument against the president by trying to play by two sets of rules.  No matter how hard the Romney campaign tries to spin his record, the fact remains, Romney economic didn't work then, and it won't work now.

So email this video to your grandparents, Facebook it to your friends, Tweet it to the folks you know who spend all their time on Twitter, and if you know people who are on Tumblr, well you know what to do.  So let's ge this done.  Thanks for your help.

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Copyright © 2012 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.