WOLFEBORO, N.H. — Mitt Romney again said Tuesday that President Obama has made the economy worse, speaking during a visit to the first-in-the-nation primary state of New Hampshire and reclaiming an argument that seemed murky last week.
Calling Obama “a very nice fellow . . . who didn’t have a track record that we could look at” during the 2008 campaign, Romney blamed the president for the economy’s deterioration since he took office in 2009.
“The president came in, and he didn’t cause the recession, as you know . . . but he didn’t make it better, he made things worse,” Romney said, speaking at Bayside Grill & Tavern in Wolfeboro. “And he made things worse through a series of actions which hurt the economy at a time when it needed to be taking off. The recovery is extraordinarily anemic, again, because things he did made that recovery worse.”
The former Massachusetts governor took his campaign message to his own back yard Tuesday morning, holding a wide-ranging town hall with about 200 of his neighbors in this resort town near his vacation home and laying out his vision for the economy, health care, foreign policy and immigration.
The 2012 Republican front-runner had seemed to backtrack on a similar claim about Obama and the economy last week, and his critics have seized on that as proof of flip-flopping — an accusation that hurt Romney during the 2008 GOP nomination race.
Romney said that cap-and-trade climate legislation, which died in the Senate; Obama’s 2010 health-care law; and increased financial regulations have chilled economic growth as businesses have sat on the sidelines.
“What [Obama] did caused them to pull back, and so [the president] made the recession deeper and made it last longer,” he said. “He made things worse. And I’m absolutely convinced that we need to have someone to lead the country who understands what it takes to create jobs.”
Read more at The Washington Post.