Take for instance a recent campaign stop in Lorain, Ohio at a factory shuttered while George W. Bush was still in office. Romney took issue with that fact that the facility was still closed, saying that underscored "the failure of the president's policies" to generate new jobs. Driving his point home was a placard affixed to his podium which read "Obama isn't working".
Indeed Romney, in harmony with congressional Republicans, has been hammering away at the president by holding up every policy, decision, or action as a complete and utter disaster - a string of failures and missteps that have done irreparable damage to the United States. In conjuring up images of failed leadership and impending economic doom, the GOP is hoping to capitalize on anxiety about the economy by characterizing Obama as a failed president - the worst since Jimmy Carter.
But as the economy improves and the public sours on the obstructionism of House Republicans, the argument that Obama has failed is an increasingly difficult case to make. While the factory in Lorain remains closed, the US economy is creating manufacturing jobs for the first time since the 1990's, accounting for a prominent chunk of the nearly 4 million new jobs created since the president took office.
In fact the failure argument may be beginning to backfire on Romney as the Obama campaign has pointed to the fact that while Romney was governor, Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation nationally. Indeed the rate of national job growth has been substantially higher under Obama (5.3%) than state-wide job growth was in Massachusetts under Romney (1.4%).
Whether or not the facts outweigh the rhetoric though remains to be seen. What's for certain is that we will continue to see increasingly acrimonious (if somewhat baseless) charges about the supposed "failures" of this president. As always though, in politics, for every punch there is a counter-punch:
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