Mitt Romney Is In For 2012!!!

Today, Mitt Romney will be announcing that he will officially be a candidate for 2012. You can watch him give his speech live by visiting the Mitt Romney Central website.

Mitt Romney's speech will focus on how Obama's lack of leadership has failed America, especially when it comes to the the economy: 

"A few years ago, Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do: We gave someone new a chance to lead, someone we hadn't known for very long, who didn't have much of a record but promised to lead us to a better place," Romney says, describing the man he hopes to meet head-to-head in November 2012.

"At the time, we didn't know what sort of a president he would make. ... Now, in the third year of his four-year term, we have more than promises and slogans to go by. Barack Obama has failed America."

The economy will be the most important issue of the 2012 election. Right now, unemployment as the number one concern with the economy following as the number two concern for Americans. It will also be the number one reason why President Barak Obama will not be reelected: 

Ultimately, the 2012 presidential election will be decided by the state of the economy, and new data released this week makes grim reading for the White House. In fact you cannot watch a US financial news network at the moment, from Bloomberg to CNBC to Fox Business, without a great deal of pessimism about the dire condition of the world’s biggest economy. 66 percent of Americans now worry the federal government will run out of money in the face of towering public debts.

To say this has been an extremely bad week for the Obama administration on the economic front would be a serious understatement. As The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, home prices in the United States have sunk to their lowest levels since 2002, falling 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2011. At the same time, employment growth is stalling, with only 38,000 Americans added to the workforce in May, the smallest increase since September. This compares with 179,000 jobs added in April. There has also been a steep slowdown in the manufacturing sector, and a downturn in the stock market on the back of weak economic news.

Mitt Romney's plan to defeat Barak Obama is pretty simple. Mitt Romney has been consistently reminding Americans of President Obama's poor performance on the economy. 

The truth is that Mitt Romney has been on the offensive with Obama when it comes to the issue of the economy. In fact, he's been doing ever since Obama walked into the White House. In October of 2009, Mitt Romney wrote an article explaining that Obama's plan to pass a second stimulus package was the wrong way to fix the economy. In December of 2009, Mitt Romney wrote an op-ed explaining to Obama the basics of job creation and attacking him for his Orwellian use of "jobs saved or created." On August 18, 2010, Romney wrote another opinion piece in which he advised Obama that the only way to grow jobs is to reduce the size of government. The former Massachusetts Governor's article was praised for his ability to lay down specifics about fixing our country's economy rather than issuing general statements as politicians tend to do in offering solutions. He also disagreed in an article with both Republicans and Obama over the passage of taxes in December of 2010. 

Mitt Romney continued to hammer Obama on the economy in the editorial pages. Romney very critical of Obama's 2011 State of the Union speech pointing out that the President lacks any direction when it comes to fixing our country's economy. In March of 2011 by writing an an op-ed for USA Today pointing out that when it comes to the issue of unemployment, President Obama has been absent in dealing with this issue despite the fact that has made multiple promises that the economy would be the main focus of his presidency. In April 2011, Romney wrote two op-eds in the National Review Online and in the Orlando Sentinel, criticizing Obama for his lack of leadership when it comes to the issue of handling the economy. 

Not only has Mitt Romney been hammering Obama in the editorials of major newspapers, but he also shared his message in the speeches he gave. The former governor of Massachusetts went after Obama on the economy in last year's 2010 CPAC conference (which you can watch here). The following year, Mitt Romney gave a rousing speech at the 2011 CPAC  in which he focused on one important issue. In that speech, he directed all of his energies at attacking Barak Obama's failure to take command of the economy and halting job losses when it was clearly our nation's most pressing concern since the day he entered office.

Mitt Romney's speech at the 2011 CPAC conference highlights the most glaring problem about the Obama Presidency when it comes to the issue of our economy. Obama has been extremely focused on accomplishing other things except  dealing with the economy and job losses. As I pointed out in an earlier blog post, President Obama has never been serious about reducing the deficit even though Obama has made multiple promises that the economy would be the main focus of his presidency: 

He made a promise to tackle the economy during the early days of his presidency and yet went on to push ObamaCare through the legislature. He repeated that promise almost a year ago after Scott Brown was elected to represent Massachusetts but still kept fighting for ObamaCare. And he has recently made that promise in September of 2010 that he would focus exclusively on the economy.  Obama has always been good at making promises but has never been good at following through with them. He makes promises and then moves onto other "important" projects like Obamacare.

Another example of Obama's lack of leadership on reducing the deficit is that he created an 18 member strong bipartisan commission to address the deficit and they came up with some bold recommendations on how to reduce the nation's debt.  However, Obama completely rejected their proposals. Now Obama wants a brand new commission to take a look at ways to reduce the debt which is what the earlier commission did. What gives the American people confidence that President Obama will listen to this new deficit commission if he rejected the proposals of the earlier commission that he created?

Even when President Obama was a Senator, he didn't take the deficit seriously since he admits that his vote against raising the debt ceiling was for political reasons.

But even for the brief moments would Obama would work on the economy, his solutions have always been to spend more money. In his 2010 State of the Union address, Obama called for spending more money to reduce unemployment even while unemployment was excessively high. A month later, Obama kept pushing for Congress to spend money to lower unemployment. Most of us wasn't surprised when Obama unveiled the same old plan of spending more money to fix the economy in his 2011 State of the Union address.

With all the money that Obama has doled out to reduce spending, unemployment is still above 9% despite promising that unemployment would never rise above 8%.

Right now, I'm reading a book called The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shlaes. Its a book that I highly recommend because its wonderful account how F.D.R. sought to fix the economy by spending large amounts of money and establishing numerous government programs. Despite the growth of government and the wild spending, F.D.R could never get unemployment below 20% throughout the entire Great Depression. The chart below nicely shows that the unemployment rate remind high for almost the entire time F.D.R was president.

 

We cannot tolerate repeating history by letting unemployment remain stagnant for a long period of time like it did under the Great Depression. We are now on the verge of heading into a double dip recession or possibly  another major Depression. Although Mitt Romney isn't the first person to point out the correlation between big government and excessive spending and long term unemployment, he's the only candidate who has the greatest potential of being able to put Obama in the unemployment line in 2012.