30 Is the New 47, So Say the Mittsters

Greg Sargent has been all over the Romney campaign's repackagings of the governor's jobs record. His surrogates, Sargent notes, took to the airwaves over the weekend to yelp that if you just subtract out the first year, when Romney inherited a bad situation, the Massachusetts jobs record is quite plummy, rising to 30th in the country in his final year.

My, that is impressive! After three years under Willard's masterful hand, one of the nation's wealthiest and most educated and most capital-rich states nearly vaulted into the top 50th percentile in job creation! Well, not "nearly" in the sense of being 26 or 27, but sort of nearly. Start measuring those Oval Office drapes!

This may be more ridiculous than any other single thing the Romney people have tried to say. If you take out 2009, after all, Barack Obama has created a net of more than 3.5 million jobs, as I noted last week.

And, as I said last week, there's something to be said for cutting both chief executives a break about their first year. Every president and governor needs time for his/her policies to take effect. And both inherited a recession. But Romney inherited a mild recession, while Obama inherited the mother of all recessions in postwar America. So if you're into cutting year-one breaks, it's pretty obvious who deserves to be cut the larger one. It's amazing that they say this stuff with a straight face, and the Obama people should respond with mockery, if they knew how to do humor, which is a topic for another day.