Romney Flip-Flops on Blaming Obama for Jobs Crisis

Mitt Romney.<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/seth/399340323/sizes/m/in/photostream/">/sethrubenstein/Flickr

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Add another entry to the long-running list of GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s flip-flops. At Sunday’s NBC/Facebook debate in Concord, Romney took a question about the nation’s woeful labor market and his criticism of President Obama’s economic plan. Romney tempered his attacks on Obama by noting, “I don’t blame him for the recession and the jobs crisis.”

But in his campaign’s 87-page economic plan, Romney does just that. If you look closely at Romney’s depiction of the Great Recession and ensuing, lingering jobs crisis, he blames Obama for the nation’s jobs crisis. Released in September 2011, Romney’s plan highlights a period from 2007 to 2009, showing how during this period 8.7 million jobs were lost in the Great Recession and another 800,000 were shed in the immediate aftermath of the recession. Amazingly, Romney’s economic plan calls this period the “Obama Recovery.” Here’s the graph to prove it:

Mitt Romney campaign.Mitt Romney campaign.

It’s chart fraud at its finest. The years 2007 and 2008, of course, were the final two of the Bush administration. The jobs crisis was at its worst during those years, including a staggering 2.6 million jobs lost in 2008. And those years have nothing to do with the “Obama recovery.”

Nor was this Romney’s only misrepresentation of Obama’s jobs record. As Tim Murphy noted, Romney falsely claimed he created more jobs as governor of Massachusetts in the 2000s than Obama has as president. In reality, Romney used the same bogus math to make this claim as he did when blaming the the nation’s unemployment woes on Obama.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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