It is verboten for Mitt Romney or his campaign surrogates to mention the most recent Republican president by name. Instead, George W. Bush — who left office as the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling — must be referred to in every reference as Pres. Obama’s “predecessor.”
Here is an example of Romney using the euphemism four times in one statement in mid-May:
ROMNEY: [Obama] was very critical of his predecessor for the debts his predecessor put in place. And sure it’s true you can’t blame one party or the other for all the debts this country has, because both parties in my opinion have spent too much and borrowed too much when they were in power. But he was very critical of his predecessor because the predecessor put together $4 trillion of debt over eight years. This president however — oh, by the way, he said that doing that was unpatriotic, irresponsible and unpatriotic. And he said he would cut the debt in half if he became president.Instead he doubled it, alright, he doubled it.”
And, of course, Romney is lying. Bush increased the national debt by nearly $5 trillion, and it has increased by almost exactly the same amount under Obama, in large part as a response to the financial collapse caused by the borrow-and-spend policies, anti-regulatory zeal and colossal incompetence of Bush and his Republican rubberstampers in Congress.
But now, just two weeks and one or two sharp shakes of the campaign Etch-A-Sketch later, it’s the Romney campaign that is blaming Romney’s weak economic record as governor of Massachusetts on, you guessed it, his predecessor, Jane Swift, a Republican. And they left it to campaign adviser Erik Ferhnstrom, the Etch-A-Sketch guy himself, to do the deed, on ABC’s “This Week”:
ERIK FERHNSTROM: Actually, when Mitt Romney arrived, Massachusetts was an economic basket house. If you throw D.C. into the mix, we were 51 out of 51. By the time Mitt Romney left four years later, we were in the middle of the pack. We were 30th in the nation in terms of job growth. That’s the trend line that you want to see.
The three governors of Massachusets prior to Romney were all Republicans. His immediate predecessor was Jane Swift, who, as lieutenant governor, had assumed office after Gov. Paul Celluci was appointed ambassador to Canada by Pres. George W. Predecessor. The governor before Celluci was Republican William Weld.
But those are just inconvenient facts that muddy the spin Ferhnstrom was applying to Romney’s economic record as Massachusetts governor. Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal Constitution breaks it down:
Romney, you see, inherited “an economic basket house” from his predecessor, Gov. Jane Swift. So he can’t really be blamed for that. But by the end of Romney’s term, as Ferhnstrom points out, job growth had increased and “that’s the trend line that you want to see. That’s called a turnaround.”
It’s an interesting theory; it also seems strangely familiar.
And how much did job growth increase? What was the extent of this “Massachusetts miracle?” In 2006, the year that Ferhnstrom wants the public to focus upon as Romney’s final year as governor, the number of jobs in the Bay State economy grew 1.3 percent. Here are two ways to put that into context:
1.) Nationwide in 2006, job growth was 1.5 percent. So even under the best spin offered by his campaign, using the year hand-selected by his staff, job growth under Romney slightly lagged the national average.
2.) In his last year as governor, Romney “produced” job growth of 1.3 percent, which Fehrnstrom lauds as “the trend line that you want to see. That’s called a turnaround.” Over the last year, the American economy under President Obama has produced identical job growth numbers of 1.3 percent, which according to Fehrnstrom means “this president is not adding jobs fast enough.”
