By Alex Seitz-Wald/Think Progress
In its effort to sell Mitt Romney as someone who understands the economy and knows how to create jobs, one of his campaign’s early talking points was that he helped create 100,000 jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital. The campaign repeated the claim throughout the primary, despite a glaring lack ofevidence to support it (even Sarah Palin doubted it).
Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.
BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.
This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain.)
Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?
And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was47th out of 50 on job creation.
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