# 35 A Romney-Manufactured Self-Problem

!It's the Economy, Stupid" may be the most famous quotation with the word "economy" in it, and the economy is often at the core of an election campaign.  So it seems to be this year.  However, Nobel Prize-winning Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman, thinks the situation this campaign is more complicated. 

As Krugman indicates in the following selection from his column today, Romney's take on the economy is a problem.

I find it amazing that the Romney campaign is having so much difficulty gaining traction with its message, but for awhile at least seemed to be gaining traction with some segments of voters.  That seems to be turning around, as Romney has pulled most of his campaigners from Iowa and is facing high single-digit deficits in Ohio polling. North Carolina numbers also seem to be drifting back to Obama.

To me, Krugman's comments provide a sensible reason for the developing shift away from Romney.  Not that the electorate thinks in as complex a way as Krugman does, so much as that voters may be sensing that, with so many other things "wrong" in what Romney has been saying, they may be starting to feel a distrust of anything he says.

Here's Krugman's take on Romney's economic plan:
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I’ve been delving a bit into what the Romney campaign and its economist fellow-travelers have been saying, and I think I have figured out the true economic doctrine Romney and his inner circle have in mind. It is, needless to say, not what the campaign has claimed.

The official line has been that the five-point program will create scads of jobs. This has a couple of problems. First, the program is vacuous — for the most part it’s a statement of desired outcomes, not policies. Second, as Glenn Kessler points out, the studies claimed as justification for the 12-million jobs number actually don’t say at all what the campaign asserts.

...[One study in particular is] an analysis of an economy that is assumed to be continually at full employment. The “job gains” the paper estimates are supply-side, not demand-side — they represent an increase in the number of people who want to work, not an increase in the number of jobs available. If you like, [the study] is claiming (implausibly) that there would be a big jump in the labor force participation rate.

And this, of course, has nothing to do with the problems of an economy where people who want to work can’t find jobs.

So the Romney campaign is lying about the rationale for its boasts about jobs.

But what’s the real story?

The answer is actually pretty clear: CONFIDENCE. The Romney notion is that we’d be having a rip-roaring recovery right now, except that Job Creators feel that Obama is looking at them funny. And so all Romney has to do is show up, and happy times will be here again.

No, seriously: in Boca Raton Romney declared that simply by being elected he could start a boom, “without actually doing anything”.

Now, the obvious riposte here is that we know why we have a weak recovery, and it’s not Obama’s evil eye — it’s the normal hangover from a severe financial crisis, which could only have been averted by much stronger fiscal and monetary stimulus.

But that’s not a story the Romney people want to hear.
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