Mitt Romney: Running Against Recovery
Jules Witcover

One of Mitt Romney's favorite pitches on the campaign trail is recalling Barack Obama's comment early in his presidency that if the county, mired in recession, didn't recover by the next election, he would be a one-term president. The Republican frontrunner is still using the line, but without as much resonance as it has had until recently.

The latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that 243,000 jobs were added in January, dropping the national unemployment rate from 9 percent in September 2011 to 8.3 percent, has taken some of the wind out of Romney's gloom-and-doom sails. The slow recovery has been the basic premise of his claim that the country needs him and his business acumen to get back on its feet.

The former Massachusetts governor has been regularly trotting out Obama's statement in 2009 that if he could not turn the economy around in three years, he would be "looking at a one-term proposition." But in a return appearance on NBC's "Today" show, the president cited the recent employment gains as grounds for deserving a second term.

In Colorado, however, Romney disagreed. "No, Mr. President, you do not deserve a second term," he said. He reminded the crowd on the eve of the Colorado Republican caucuses that Obama "said if we let him borrow nearly a trillion dollars, he'd keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent. ... So he does not deserve it based upon that."

It's much too early, to be sure, to contend that the weak economy is out of the woods yet. Most economists are predicting there may well be more ups and downs on the jobless rate between now and the November election. But the upward trend line over the last several months has been clear, and Obama is making the most of it politically.

The peril for Romney in joining Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's unrelenting harping on the one-term president battle cry is that he risks appearing to root for a continuation of the economic doldrums. While Republicans generally may yearn for Obama's departure, their deep hostility toward him is not reflected in most public-opinion polls. The latest Gallup daily tracking survey has the president running even at 46 percent in its approval-disapproval ratings, and other polls are more favorable.

Any appearance by Romney of running against the nation's economic recovery in the hope of getting rid of Obama also invites another risk. It can add fuel to Democratic arguments that the former venture capital multimillionaire lacks the life experience, if not the empathy, to feel the pain being endured by working-class Americans.

His gaffes in saying first that he likes "to fire people" and then that "I'm not concerned about the very poor," in his intense focus on the middle class, may have been little more than careless or lazy verbalizing. However, unfortunately for Romney, his whole being often evokes upper-class insensitivity. Politically, the last thing he needs is to leave an impression of detachment from the plight of the poor and unemployed.

From all other visible indications, Romney seems a carbon copy of his very likeable and decent father, the late George Romney, former Michigan governor and Republican presidential candidate of the late 1960s, who became a very successful businessman by building and promoting one of the first small cars for everyman, the AMC Rambler.

But in one sense, Mitt Romney also brings to mind another late Massachusetts politician, Elliot Richardson, a dapper patrician who ran and lost for governor but went on to hold four cabinet posts in the Ford and Nixon administrations. During one of Richardson's campaigns, Boston journalist Mike Barnicle facetiously proposed a campaign slogan for him: "Vote for Elliot. He's better than you are."

In any event, whether or not Romney is seen as disconnected from the hoi polloi, he cannot afford to be perceived as taking uncommon political advantage of the country's economic woes to drive Obama from the White House. At the same time, his worse political nightmare right now might be a more rapid recovery than now seems in store.