The New Yorker – yeah, I know, and believe me: they’re not being friendly to Romney on general principles – on Romney’s decision to go with a possibly semantically null ‘jobs created’ argument to justify his Bain experience:
Ironically, Romney has made a similar mistake to the one the Obama Administration made in early 2009, when two of Obama’s economists released a study with overly optimistic unemployment projections. Ever since then, critics have been able to point to that study as evidence that, if judged by Obama’s own standard, his stimulus has been a failure.
(Via Hot Air Headlines) The New Yorker is referring, of course, the infamous “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan:” the “two economists” were Christina Romer (former Chair of Council of Economic Advisers) and Jared Bernstein (former Chief Economist and Economic Policy Adviser for the Vice President). Arguably, Romer and Bernstein have the honor of being the first two individuals whose careers were sacrificed the benefit of President Obama: also, contra the New Yorker the administration was certainly happy enough to own said plan. Up until the moment that it became clear that it wasn’t even remotely going to work.
What does this have to do with Romney? Not much, except to note that if we’re going to compare goofy, meaningless economic statements the king of them is still going to be Barack Obama.