You’ll never believe who Mitt Romney thinks we should thank for preventing a Great Depression.

Here’s something that should blow your Splenda-addled mind: Though 56% still blame George W. Bush and the GOP for the financial crisis we’re climbing out of, the former president is still more popular than current GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney.

34% of voters view Mitt Romney favorably (ABC/Washington Post), lowest of any presidential candidate in decades. Things more popular than Mitt Romney include typos on Twitter and genital odor.

Now that the President has put the taint of social Darwinism on Paul Ryan’s social Darwinist budget—a budget that guts Medicare, slashes taxes for millionaires and explodes the debt, a budget that Romney has endorsed–Mitt needs to find some way to appear to have moved to the center.

Face it: No one was better at hiding his extremism than George W. Bush.

When Bush blew the surplus to create almost no jobs, when he invaded a nearly random country, when he created a Supreme Court that will be known for Citizens United forever, he managed to do it in a way that was likable to about 50% of the voting population. He was the unrecovered alcoholic people wanted to have a beer with.

In 2000, Bush almost won by pretending to be compassionate.

In 2004, a tsunami of spending on homeland security and tax breaks created a Keynesian wave of good enough job growth. That, plus anti-gay measures on several state ballots, helped to get Bush reelected. (Then he proceded to be so recklessly conservative he tried to privatize Social Security months before the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression. )

Mitt Romney needs to find a way to put together W. Bush’s coalition: men and women who hate gays, women’s rights or taxes. This will be tough. Like Mitt Romney, opinions on gays have changed drastically since 2004.

But George W. Bush could do it! I’m sure that’s what Karl Rove believes.

And Mitt is starting to get it. On March 21, he said:

“I keep hearing the president say he’s responsible for keeping the country out of a Great Depression,” Romney said at a town hall in Arbutus, Maryland. “No, no, no, that was President George W. Bush and [then-Treasury Secretary] Hank Paulson.”

Wow. Awesome. THANK YOU, GEORGE W. BUSH. Sing it, Mitt. Please engage America in a discussion of how Bush left our economy losing 700,000 jobs a month because he was so busy saving us.

I hope to hear Mitt go into depth about how George W. Bush saved the economy George W. Bush almost completely destroyed. It’s like how John McCain saved us from Sarah Palin by losing.

Some say that saddling yourself with the guy who 56% of the public blame for this Great Recession is bad strategy. But when you’re as dull as Mitt, any glow will do.

[CC image by cliff1066™]