Yep. Mitt Romney just voluntarily made George W. Bush a 2012 issue. (Scott Audette/Reuters)





Yep. Mitt Romney just voluntarily made George W. Bush a 2012 issue. (Scott Audette/Reuters)

brain

"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."

Mitt Romney must have hired an Etch-A-Sketch artist to reprogram hisinternal memory chips because this sure isn't how I remember things going down:So how did Bush and Paulson save the American economy? According to Romney, they saved it with the Wall Street bailout. "I think they were right," he said . Of course he does—to Mitt Romney, banks were worth saving. The auto industry, on the other hand, not so much.

But even though TARP may have prevented the complete collapse of the financial system, it didn't save the economy. Lest anybody forget, during the last year of the Bush presidency, we lost 4.7 million private sector jobs, 3 million of them coming after the passage of TARP, which is what Romney was defending. In Bush's last month in office, the economy lost 839,000 jobs—and things were getting worse. Even Romney himself could see the economy was in crisis. In December of 2008, Romney called for passage of a stimulus plan that was broadly similar to the one President Obama ultimately passed.

Now, however, he wants everybody to forget that President Obama inherited an economic catastrophe. Well, good luck with that. No matter what his campaign believes, our memories aren't like Etch-A-Sketches. We do not easily forget. And by willingly injecting George W. Bush into the 2012 political conversation, Romney's making sure that we'll remember.