According to Romney advisers Eric "etch-a-sketch" Fehrnstrom and Ed Gillespie, attacking Mitt Romney's record of job creation during his tenure as the governor of Massachusetts isn't fair because Romney inherited a bad economy.
The Obama campaign offers a similar response when Republicans try to attribute the Bush fiscal 2009 budget and the 800,000 jobs lost per month to the Obama Administration, but in their case it's actually true that President Obama inherited the worst economy the nation had seen in decades and has managed to turn it around since then. In the case of Romney, he inherited a mediocre economy and managed to make it nearly the worst in the nation.
Regardless of the facts, Ferhnstrom and Gillespie trotted out this line of defense on the Sunday morning talk shows yesterday even though they would afford no such skepticism to the Obama administration under similar circumstances.
Massachusetts “did fall to 47th out of 50 in jobs creation,” Cutter said on ABC’s “This Week.” “Wages went down when they were going up in the rest of the country. He left his successor with debt and a deficit, and manufacturing jobs left that state at twice the rate as the rest of the country.”
Fehrnstrom disputed the stat. “Can I just say, on the jobs question, because this comes up repeatedly that Massachusetts was 47 out of 50 in terms of jobs growth,” he said. “Actually, when Mitt Romney arrived, Massachusetts was an economic basket house. If you throw D.C. into the mix, we were 51 out of 51. By the time Mitt Romney left four years later, we were in the middle of the pack. We were 30th in the nation in terms of job growth.” [...]
Senior Romney adviser Ed Gillespie had a similar exchange with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace. “When [Romney] took office it was No. 50 in job creation. Actually 51 if you count the District of Columbia,” Gillespie said.
To his credit, Fox News' Chris Wallace didn't let Ed Gillespie get away with that claim either and corrected him that Massachusetts was 47th during the entire Romney governship.
Massachusetts ranked 37th when Mitt Romney took office. It ranked 47th when he left office. He actually made things worse. Not better. Massachusetts was never "30th in the nation." Not when he took office or left office.