Mitt Romney's Fantasy World

Jamelle Bouie

In his victory speech last night, the former Massachusetts governor offered a startlingly dishonest take on the last three and a half years of the Obama presidency.

In a sane world, Mitt Romney would be laughed out of politics for the speech he gave celebrating his final wins (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York) in the Republican nomination contest. The centerpiece of the address was a riff on the classic formulation, “Are you better of now than you were four years ago?”


What’s frustrating about this is the fact that it ignores the last four years of political history in an attempt to put Barack Obama at the center of the country’s economic troubles.

But that’s ridiculous. Here’s what we know about the last four years. In 2008, the economy fell into a deep recession. The proximate cause was the collapse of the global financial system, but the process itself was long in the making; George W. Bush was a terrible steward of the economy, and his policies—along with those of congressional Republicans—yielded a decade of slow growth and sluggish job creation. Along with an out-of-control financial sector, the end result of all of this was the worst recession in more than seven decades.

In response, the public ejected the Republican Party from power, and elected Barack Obama to the presidency...By the time he reached office, however, two things had happened. First, the economy had gotten worse. Unemployment shot to new highs, growth reversed, and the United States entered economic freefall. The overwhelming priority for the incoming administration was to stabilize the economy and keep things from deteriorating into a second Great Depression.

The other thing was less remarked upon at the time, but no less important: Congressional Republicans, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, pledged to make Obama a one-term president by any means necessary. Their plan was to use legislative rules like the filibuster to create a supermajority requirement for everything from confirming nominees to passing new legislation...Even without Republican support, Democrats managed to pass a stimulus, health-care reform, and financial reform, but each bill involved a tremendous amount of work, and left the party in poor shape with the public. Still, Republican obstruction was successful in reducing the size of the stimulus, stigmatizing health-care reform, and taking the teeth out of financial reform.

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http://prospect.org/article/mitt-romneys-fantasy-world