"I've had it up to here with reminders about how much we fucked things up last time!" (Scott Audette/Reuters)
Mitt Romney's
"prebuttal" of President Obama's speech:
"This president is unwilling to take responsibility for his mistakes, and he's going to be looking everywhere he can to find someone else to blame," Romney told roughly 100 supporters gathered in a sandwich shop here just outside Milwaukee. [...]
"Maybe he’ll look for the party that had no power whatsoever for the first two years of his administration, maybe he’ll say, 'Oh, it’s the Republicans.' But, you know, he had a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate for his first two years," Romney said.
The only reason Romney complains when President Obama assigns blame is that it's Republicans who deserve the blame for the mess Obama inherited. Romney might wish history didn't begin until January 21, 2009, but that's not reality. The truth is that when President Obama took office, the economy was collapsing. Romney knows this: That's why
he called for a stimulus in December 2008.
But even if history did begin on January 21, 2009, Mitt Romney would be wrong. Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority for just six months, and it came long after the stimulus was passed. So for most of those first two years, Republicans were able to make it very difficult for Democrats to get anything done. It's actually a testament to Obama's skill that he managed to get as much done as he did. And all of it happened over the objections of Republican leadership.
The bottom-line: The reason Romney doesn't want to talk about the past and doesn't want to assign blame is that he's still pushing the very ideas that got us into trouble in the first place. The GOP's Romney-Ryan plan is actually worse than a bad idea. It's a bad idea that's failed. And even though it's a proven failure, they want to try it all over again.
