President Barack Obama’s senior campaign strategist is staging a Boston press event today to push public attention away from Obama’s painful economic record and towards Gov. Mitt Romney’s gubernatorial record in Democratic-dominated Massachusetts.
The criticism of Romney’s record is coming “from a crassly political operative,” not an respected economist, scoffed Douglas Holtz Eakin, a GOP-affiliated economist and the president of the libertarian-minded think tank American Action Forum.
That “helps explain the quality of economic policy during the President’s term,” he said.
Romney’s campaign also had a quick response to Axelrod’s Boston event.
“This is another desperate attack from President Obama because he has no positive record to run on,” said spokesman Ryan Williams.
“We’re happy to compare the 4.7% unemployment rate Mitt Romney was able to accomplish [and] if President Obama had even half the job creation record of Mitt Romney, then he would be running on it,” he said.
The press event is part of the Obama campaign effort to persuade swing-voters — especially working-class white voters — that the 2012 election is a choice between Obama and Romney, rather than a virtual referendum on the incumbent’s record.
Conventional wisdom holds that a referendum-style election would be a problem for Obama because his tenure has featured high unemployment, record debt and record deficits, shrinking incomes, a shrinking workforce, multiplying foreign-policy crises, and increased political polarization.
Libertarians and social-conservatives are gradually rallying behind Romney, despite his record of pushing for greater government intrusion in the economy and healthcare, because they consider Obama is far more willing to regulate the economy for political goals.
The Boston event, which is slated to also include several Democratic politicians, was presaged May 30 with a five-page memo from Axelrod.
The memo declared that Romney’s economic record to be a failure during his 2003 to 2007 tenure as governor of the state.
“When he left office, however, state debt had increased, the size of government had grown, and over his four years, Massachusetts’ record of job creation was among the worst in the nation,” Axelrod declared in his memo.
The memo, however, doesn’t discuss the role of the Democratic-controlled state House and Senate, nor does it mention that the state’s formal unemployment rate was under 5 percent in 2007, which is almost half the 2012 national unemployment rate.
Nor does it compare Obama’s record to Romney’s record, instead cherry picking statistics to stain Romney’s record as much as possible.
“Under Mitt Romney, Massachusetts plummeted from 36th to 47th out of 50 in job creation and manufacturing jobs declined at twice the national average, and for the first time in more than a decade,” said the memo.
“The mind swims at the thought of a memo in which Mr. Axelrod applied the same harsh distortion to President Obama’s far less successful record,” said Holtz-Eakin.