Not surprisingly, the media for the most part has overlooked
what most people in Massachusetts thought of Mitt Romney’s governorship, which
he left with a disapproval rating of 60 percent. To many, Romney treated his
responsibilities with the off-hand indifference of someone who just needed to
put something that sounded substantial on his resume in the pursuit of his
dream to become president—something he apparently dreamed of since his father’s failed bid for the office in 1968.
We have pointed out (as the mainstream media has not) that
Romney’s record as a “job creator” is a fraud. It is not “job creation” when in
your quest to make a lot of money fast, with a powerful father with connections
and lots of money to back you, you do what Romney did: Buy companies that were
easy marks for hostile takeovers, cut jobs, lower wages and benefits to
maximize profitability, and then sell them for a killing with hardly any of
your own money at stake. It’s like this investment company that bought this
low-rent apartment I used to live in near downtown Seattle; it bought the
building from the owners who couldn’t afford maintaining it, put a paint job on
the façade, called the place a “hotel,” and
doubled and then tripled the rent—forcing all the low-income residents out.
Unfortunately, this business plan had a problem: It was the same old building
inside, and the investment company couldn’t attract enough people who would pay
the exorbitant rents, and now the place is just a pile of rubble.
A pile of rubble is essentially how Romney left the state of
Massachusetts when he vacated after one term (kind of like Sarah Palin, except
that Romney didn’t “officially” vacate his title until his term was over).
Romney famously did not take a salary; considering his performance in office,
he should have paid the state for taking his duties with all the diligence of a
dilettante. Between 2002 and 2006, the country saw an overall 5 percent
increase in economic activity; in Massachusetts, it was 0.9 percent. During
Romney’s term it hovered just above the bottom in the nation in job growth, and
one economist pointed out that during Romney’s term in office, Massachusetts
was near the bottom in almost every economic indicator.
How can this be? Wasn’t Romney a “businessman” who knew how
to create jobs? Well, he wasn’t that kind of businessman; he took his cues from the robber barons of the late 19th
century: Get rich as quickly as possible, and damn the working people he
plundered. And this is what he proposes to do if elected president—increase taxes
on the poor and low-income (who he imputes as the source of the country's ills) while cutting social and jobs programs, and increase
the largesse of the rich and powerful.
But don’t take my word for it. In a little publicized press
conference a few weeks ago, Massachusetts State Sen. Karen Spilka—tired of the
lies Romney was telling about his “record” and “bipartisanship”—noted that the
veto-addicted Romney hardly took the trouble to even know the names of the
lawmakers he forced to deal with; even though she worked with him for weeks on
a bill, for all he cared she could have been the janitor. Incensed by his
patrician callousness, Spilka confided in a Republican colleague who confessed that
Romney didn’t know who any of the state legislators from his own party were,
either. To many legislators, the “aloof and distant” Romney expected them to “obey”
his “orders” like any other low-level “employee.”
The New York Times would dub Romney the “absentee governor”
for being outside the state nearly one-in-three days he was “governor.” Was he
busy drumming-up business and jobs for the state? The evidence suggests not;
the evidence does suggest, however, that he was busy inflating himself for a
future presidential run.
Another Romney fantasy is his claim that he has “experience”
balancing budgets. But Romney not only left the state little better off than he
found it economically, but he left behind a budget deficit of more than $1
billion. According to Spilka, Romney left the state “sinking.”
Spilka concluded that it was foolish to believe that Romney
would be any different as president as he was governor. “We’ve seen the real
Mitt Romney (and) we know his record. Massachusetts knows Mitt Romney more than
anyone else in the country, and Massachusetts is voting for Barack Obama.”
Hopefully it isn’t too late for the rest of the country to see the fraud that
is Romney.
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