The Campaign Narrative Detached From Reality

Yesterday Mitt Romney went to an abandoned warehouse in Ohio and blamed Barack Obama for failed economic policy.   "If you want to know where his vision leads open your eyes," stated Mittens.  But the factory closed in 2008 when the guy Romney voted for twice was president and not Obama.  Doesn't matter says the Romney campaign.  The fact that the factory is still closed is proof that Obama's policies have failed. 

That the economy under Barack Obama has created more jobs in the last year than Bush did in 8 years doesn't matter either.  According to Big Love Mitt Romney, none of the job creations are a result of this administration. Only failure can be attributed to current policy.  Whatever jobs have been created have happened despite President Obama.  Or so the Republican story goes.

That's the campaign narrative the Republicans want told this year.  Things would be a lot better if you would just put us back in charge.  Allowing such a narrative to happen first requires a complete disregard of recent history.  Republican policy led this country from Jan. 2001-Jan. 2009.  And it ended with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.  This is the part of the narrative Republicans don't want told, however.  We can't mention anything that happened during George Bush's presidency.  We instead have to begin history in January of 2009 and pretend anything that happened prior to then has no bearing on today's world.

Economically speaking, though, things are much better than they were when Obama took over and changed the policies Republicans now want us to go back to.  The Dow is up 85%.  Over 4 million private sector jobs have been added since 2009.  And the budget deficit has been cut from $1.5 trillion when Bush was in office to $1.1 trillion-- the single largest deficit reduction in history.  If a Republican had any one of those things to brag about, much less all of them like Obama does, we would never hear the end of it.  The truth, however, is quite different. Republican administrations have been nothing but a train wreck of huge budget deficits, tanking economies, huge spending increases and growing government by leaps and bounds.

The reality Republicans claim never happened