Our economic nightmare is just beginning.

Mitt Romney has shed the dark blue suit, white shirt, and pale blue tie of his 2008 campaign for an open-neck tattersall shirt with its sleeves rolled up. His sideburns are graying, and his eyes are lined, but he still sports a boyish grin and radiates the can-do enthusiasm of a man who is promising to turn the country around the way he once turned around the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. This August morning, in the wake of the battle over raising the debt ceiling and Standard & Poor’s decision to downgrade America’s credit rating, he has come to Concord, New Hampshire, to speak to the local Chamber of Commerce. Beforehand, he agreed to answer a few questions from reporters.

In an opening statement, Romney blamed Standard & Poor’s decision on President Obama. The president’s spokespeople, he said, “would substitute Harry Truman’s ‘The buck stops here’ with a new motto: ‘The buck stops somewhere else.’ The truth is the buck stops at the president’s desk, and he needs to reassert the leadership necessary to restore America’s financial foundation.” To achieve such a foundation, Romney endorsed the congressional Republican plan, dubbed “cut, cap, and balance,” which would slash $111 billion from next year’s budget, reduce federal spending as a percentage of GDP from 22.5 to 19.7 percent in six years, and adopt a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. The plan represents an attempt to achieve private-sector prosperity through public-sector austerity.

“Mr. Romney,” I said, after he had fielded several other questions, “I want to ask you something about history. You know, when Herbert Hoover had to face a financial crisis and then unemployment, his strategy was to balance the budget and cut spending, and that made things worse. When Roosevelt came in, unemployment was twenty-five and went to fourteen percent by 1937. With deficits. Aren’t you repeating the Hoover mistake?” Romney’s grin turned quizzical. “Do you really think so?” he asked me. “I do think so, but you go ahead,” I replied.

“Let’s go back to the Hoover days,” Romney began. “The issue in the Hoover years was what was happening in the budget that year. This year, we are spending $1.6 trillion more than we take in, and that would have made anyone in either party blush if they saw numbers like that. And the issue today is not just this year’s deficit, it’s deficits as far as the eyes can see. ... America has to rein in the excessive spending not just this year, but over the long period of time.”

I didn’t think it would be proper to turn Romney’s press conference into a debate about history, so I let his answer stand. But he seemed to be suggesting that the premise of my question was flawed because deficits are much larger today and will probably continue unabated. And they are larger—but that is because our GDP and government are also larger. Meanwhile, if our deficits stretch “as far as the eyes can see,” so did the deficits in Hoover’s day, which continued unabated for 16 years. Romney was insisting that there was nothing to be learned from Hoover’s response to the Great Depression. But, in fact, what happened in the United States and Europe in the ’30s is an excellent—perhaps, the best—guide to what is happening to us now.