Mitt Romney is trying to make jobs, and in particular manufacturing jobs, an issue against Obama. Romney aides say he will stay on offense. "Mitt was emphasizing this administration's failure to create manufacturing jobs, or any jobs for that matter," said Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul. "As president, Mitt Romney will make job creation his top priority, including the creation of jobs in manufacturing."
One doesn't have to think Obama has had the best job creation or manufacturing policies to see a few problems with this. First off, this is Mitt Romney's own record on job creation:
Mitt Romney's campaign spin is that he was a businessman, so he knows how to create jobs, and that's why he should be president. Except, as Stephen Colbert points out, Mitt Romney's business career had more in common with Gordon Gecko than the owner of your local corner store. As even the New York Post pointed out, Romney's business success depended on destroying more jobs than he created. And when he was governor, Massachusetts had one of the worst job creation records in the country. So if President Gecko is what you're looking for, Mitt Romney is your man.
Second, our last "CEO president" who was going to do such amazing things for the economy was one George W. Bush. And in his two terms, the economy shed 4.5 million manufacturing jobs, nearly 3.5 million of those before the beginning of the recession.
There's no question that the loss of good manufacturing jobs has been a problem for the economy workers live in, if not for the one multimillionaires like Romney dominate. And it's not an issue that Obama has addressed as consistently as needed, let alone as effectively.
In fact, manufacturing is actually in a slight uptick at the moment:
Manufacturing jobs in May totaled 11.7 million, up 1.4% from a year earlier, according to preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the same period, total nonfarm jobs grew just 0.7%. In 2010 and early this year, manufacturing output has grown as customers began building up depleted inventories. Manufacturing industrial production, measured on a quarter-to-quarter basis, grew at a 7% annual rate in the first three months of 2011, after expanding at a 3.4% annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2010.
That's a start, but it's not enough, and if the Obama administration thinks it is, there's a world of hurt coming for Democrats in 2012. But the idea that Mitt "Bain Capital" Romney is a reasonable vehicle for an economic populist message against Barack Obama is one of the better jokes of the campaign so far.
