Michelle Malkin Ignores the Romney Jobs/Stimulus Record to Attack Obama's Record

Michelle Malkin is pushing another Romney truth by attacking that other idiot named Barack.

The Right Scoop reports Michelle Malkin didn’t mince any words tonight in her interview on Hannity, pleading with Team Romney to put the fists out there and fight back hard against Obama, exposing the “Obama jobs death toll and the beltway jobs massacre and the thousands of real workers out there who have had their pensions and health care stripped.”

Here's the problem Malkin seems to ignore like so many other conservatives that have jumped on the Mitt for Brains bandwagon. Romney had his own stimulus program in Massachusetts that was very much like Obama's. It promised more jobs by funding things like green energy. Like Obama's the results were disastrous for the cost to taxpayers. Once again, we see how an easy argument that can be made against Obama is complicated by the Romney record.

Salon writes:

As governor, Romney proposed more than $700 million in economic stimulus in a pair of packages over three years to right a sickly state economy that shed thousands of jobs before he took office, including offering to hand employers $30,000 for each worker they hired, even though he now bashes his Republican and Democratic foes over wasteful government spending.

As he stumps in Michigan, experts say this is yet another example of how Romney’s moderate governing style clashes with his conservative campaign attacks against Republican and Democratic rivals, amplifying Romney’s image as a candidate without a core.

“This has been his greatest vulnerability,” said Julian Zelizer, a Princeton University political scientist. “He looks like a guy who’ll say anything to win, and it’s a problem.”

Romney, like Obama, inherited a disaster. By the time he took office in January 2003, the Massachusetts unemployment rate rose to 5.8 percent from 5.3 percent a year earlier, and 66,000 fewer people had jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And his Republican predecessor left him a $3 billion budget deficit.

That year, Romney balanced the budget with Democrats by cutting spending and raising fees without hiking taxes (although some critics argued the fees amounted to tax hikes).

Romney’s first stimulus proposal in 2003 was a relatively narrow $125 million one. Eventually, Romney and the Democrats agreed on a $100 million version with tax credits and grants to promote the high technology industry. But the governor vetoed workforce training grants used to upgrade workers’ skills.

Two years later, Romney was eyeing a presidential bid, and job creation stubbornly lagged (Massachusetts would place 47thin the nation in job creation under Romney according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies). This time, the governor went big. In February 2005, Romney unveiled a sweeping $600 million stimulus package to kick-start the economy and create 20,000 jobs over five years.

Oh and it gets better. Remember how Obama's stimulus had funding for transportation projects like highways and high-speed rail...

The biggest big-ticket item was $300 million in bonds diverted for transportation projects, some of the money going straight to private companies’ infrastructure improvements. He’d also put about $250 million back into employers’ pockets but let them skip tax payments to the state’s jobless benefits fund for a year – this was controversial, since the fund was just beginning to build itself back up after the recession.

Most controversial: Romney wanted to spend $37 million to create new jobs by offering employers $30,000 for each new person they hired.

Approach with caution Michelle Malkin. You obviously aren't considering Romney's own record on these matters.