his state ranked 47th in job creation during his term.

His poor job creation record shows his "claimed" experience with the economy did 

absolutely no good at all.

 

A similar situation now a tepid economy is not producing enough jobs. And a successful businessman promises he can use his private-sector experience to jump-start the economy. This is presidential candidate Mitt Romney now, but it was also Romney nearly a decade ago when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, 

a state that was still reeling from the tech bubble’s burst.

 

A core argument of Romney’s presidential campaign is that he knows how to create jobs based on his career in finance. As governor, Romney faced his first test in applying his business background to a slow-growing economy — and data show that the results were poor.

 

Massachusetts was one of just four states that by the time of the financial crisis still had 

not recovered all the jobs they had lost during the 2001 recession. And, as Romney’s opponents 

have pointed out, the state ranked 47th in job creation during his term.

 

The parallels between Massachusetts then and the country as a whole now point to the 

same central problem that has dogged the U.S. economy the last three times it’s climbed out 

of a recession: The recovery hasn’t created enough jobs.

 

Many state policymakers and economists say Romney struggled to apply his business 

expertise to Massachusetts’s problems during his tenure.

 

“There was this tremendous sense of a lost opportunity. Nobody questioned 

this was an incredibly capable man,” said Stephen Crosby, who was secretary of 

administration and finance for the two Republican administrations before Romney’s. 

“If he put his skills to work, in a really dedicated and thoughtful and appropriate way, 

there was a sense that he could’ve had a much greater positive impact.”

 

Romney’s campaign says he curbed the state’s unemployment problem.

 

“As governor he confronted an economy very similar to Obama’s economy: high unemployment and no 

job creation,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in a statement. “Under his leadership and 

economic reforms the Massachusetts unemployment rate went from 5.6 percent to 4.7 percent 

and the state had a positive record of nearly 50,000 new jobs created.”

 

But Andrew Sum, a professor of economics But Andrew Sum, a professor of economics at 

Northeastern University, says the unemployment rate fell only because people 

were leaving the workforce in droves during Romney’s term. Just one state had a 

bigger drop in its labor force during the same period, according to Sum — that 

was Louisiana, which was hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

 

“There was not one measure where the state did well under his term in office. 

We were below average and often near the bottom,” said Sum, who is also the director 

of Northeastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies.

 

A dot-com bust

 

When Romney entered office in January 2003, Massachusetts was shedding jobs at a faster rate than 

the country as a whole. The state had ridden the dot-com boom to greater riches, but when the bubble burst, 

it struggled to stem the losses.

 

The state had lost about 158,000 jobs, or 4.7 percent of its workforce, from the first quarter of 2001 to the 

month Romney took office, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-massachusetts-governor-romneys-record-on-jobs-was-unremarkable/2012/02/06/gIQABzEfxQ_story.html