American Bridge hits Mitt's jobs rhetoric

Turns out it's not just health care where President Barack Obama sounds a lot like Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Ahead of the June unemployment numbers release this morning, the Democratic reserach group American Bridge is circulating video of a press conference Romney gave in 2006 to defend his economic record as governor.

“I came in and the jobs had been just falling, like off a cliff. I came in and they kept falling for 11 months and then we turned around and we’re coming back. And that’s progress," Romney said. "And if you’re going to suggest to me that somehow the day I got elected – somehow jobs should immediately turn around, why that would be silly.

"It takes a while to get things turned around. We were in a recession, we were losing jobs every months, we’ve turned around," Romney continued. "We want to keep that going to the extent we can.”

Unlike health care, there are substantive difference between how Obama has managed the economy as president and how Romney managed it as governor. But rhetorically, there's not much space between Obama ca. 2012 and Romney ca. 2006, and it's a reminder that much of the debate over the economy is a fight over who gets stuck with blame for conditions a political executive can only partly control.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/07/american-bridge-hits-mitts-jobs-rhetoric-128145.html