Mitt can hide, but he can’t run

Mitt Romney has finally found something to improve his record-low approval ratings: hiding.

By focusing on schmoozing with donors and keeping his “Let me explain why your layoff/foreclosure is good for the economy” tone and smirk off of television, he’s brought his approval rating to 48 percent. That’s still well below the President who has a 56 percent approval rating and most Kardashians.

Hiding has become Romney’s favorite campaign tactic. He’s hiding his tax returns, the departments he’ll cut and what he’ll do in Afghanistan. He won’t tell us what tax deductions he’ll eliminate as he proposes cutting his own tax bill in half. And, he refuses to tell anyone where he stands on The Paycheck Fairness Act.

The Obama campaign is using these great videos featuring deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter delivering concise, sharp fact checks to call out the BS in Koch/Rove’s ads. And in the latest video above, Cutter points out how Mitt Romney is trying to hide his terrible job creation record in Massachusetts by hiding how poorly did in his first three years as governor.

The most appalling hypocrisy of Romney’s jobs spin is that he uses one set of numbers for his performance in office and another for the President. Any fair assessment of Mitt Romney’s jobs performance versus the President finds Romney lacking:

…Obama has created a net 3.635 million jobs. Applying the same rules to Romney’s numbers through the same time period—that is, through April of his fourth year in office, 2006—we credit Romney with 64,500 jobs. So he grew jobs by 1.9 percent. Obama’s job-growth rate is 2.35 percent.

But even this misses the key issue Republicans love to ignore: President Obama inherited an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs and this hemorrhaging didn’t stop until the Stimulus went into effect. The GOP likes to pretend the jobs would have stopped disappearing magically if we did nothing. Romney himself almost threatened one out of eight jobs in this country by telling Congress not to step in with emergency loans for the auto industry.

Romney not only has to hide his record and his face. He also has to hide the President’s accomplishments.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent—who I feel is the most essential blogger to follow this election season—argues that getting the mainstream media to talk about GOP sabotage and intentional gridlock is nearly impossible. He knows this because he’s courageously been trying to get reporters to ask about Romney’s bad jobs math for months.

That’s the beauty of these videos from Cutter and OFA. They circumvent the guardians of the “both sides do it” narrative and give all of us a chance to spread the truth. I hope you’ll share this video with your friends and foes today.

[CC image by Adobe of Chaos | Flickr]