Romney Says Obama Doesn’t Deserve Credit for January’s U.S. Payrolls Gain

By John McCormick and Amanda J. Crawford - Feb 4, 2012 5:19 AM GMT+0700

Mitt Romney said President Barack Obama doesn’t deserve credit for improvement in the economy, saying the man he’s seeking to replace in November has stymied U.S. growth.

“This president has not helped the process; he’s hurt it,” the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination told 14 local businessmen he met today with in Sparks, Nevada. “If I’m the president, I will see what you do as being a very good thing, a patriotic and good thing.”

In a report announced today, the U.S. jobless rate fell in January to the lowest in three years as payrolls climbed more than forecast. The unemployment rate dropped to 8.3 percent, the lowest since February 2009. The 243,000 increase in jobs is the biggest in nine months and exceeded all forecasts in a Bloomberg News survey.

Romney, campaigning a day before Nevada holds caucuses that polls suggest he will easily win, called the numbers “good news” before targeting Obama for criticism.

The economy “has taken a lot longer than it should have to come back, in part because of the policies of this administration,” Romney said. “For that, the president deserves the blame that he’ll receive in this campaign.”

Pipeline Issue

Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Romney’s leading rival in the Republican race, also criticized Obama as an impediment to an economic rebound. At a rally in Las Vegas, he cited as an example the president’s rejection earlier this month of a permit for TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline.

In an interview on CNN, Gingrich said of Obama that if the economy “gets better and better and better between now and the election, he will get some credit. On the other hand, if this is a lull before it starts getting worse, his re-election will be in enormous trouble.”

Obama, in remarks today in the Washington suburb of Arlington, Virginia, said the jobs data show “the economy is growing stronger,” and the recovery “is speeding up.”

Nevada, which Obama won in the 2008 presidential election, is seen by political analysts as a battleground in this year’s general election. The president visited Las Vegas last week as part of a campaign-like tour after his Jan. 24 State of the Union address.

Nevada’s Unemployment

The state had the nation’s highest unemployment rate, 12.6 percent, in December. For the fifth straight year, Nevada (STEHNV) also had the highest rate of home foreclosure filings in 2011, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a data seller in Irvine, California.

Romney said Obama has focused on promoting partisan measures as president, pushing through “a number of pieces of legislation that his base voters wanted that frankly made it very hard for enterprises to recover.”

He also said banks have slowed their lending out of concern over increased federal regulation.

“They’ve become less flexible and not more flexible at a time when they should be more flexible,” he said.

Speaking later to several hundred people at a rally inside an airport hangar in Elko, Nevada, Romney charged that Obama has “failed the American people.”

Fred Weeks, 67, a geography and government teacher from Spring Creek, Nevada, said it impressed him that Romney visited the state’s sparsely populated northeast corner.

“It shows he cares,” Weeks said. “We’ve got to get Obama out of office and Romney probably has the best chance.”

Gingrich, at his Las Vegas event, shifted his criticism between Obama and Romney.

Wage Issue

He assailed a Romney proposal to tie minimum wage increases to inflation, saying the plan would exacerbate unemployment among young people and hurt small businesses. Romney doesn’t understand the free market, Gingrich said, or that small businesses drive the economy.

“My theory of life is simple: We want you to get a job, then we want you to get a better job and someday we want you to own the job,” he told the crowd at a bar where sawdust covers much of the floor.

Gingrich said he would cut taxes and regulations, while developing American energy -- the opposite of what he said Obama has done. “He is sort of the anti-jobs presidency,” he said.

Gingrich also sought to turn a negative into a positive on a topic that has hurt his presidential ambitions: his consulting work after leaving Congress for the government-backed mortgage company Freddie Mac.

“We did not create Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that rich guys like Mitt Romney and Goldman Sachs could make money,” Gingrich said to cheers from the crowd. “We created them to provide low-cost housing to the American people and their current behavior is a betrayal of the very purpose of founding them and Congress should be investigating them right now.”

To contact the reporters on this story: John McCormick in Elko, Nevada, at jmccormick16@bloomberg.net; Amanda J. Crawford in Las Vegas at acrawford24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeanne Cummings at jcummings21@bloomberg.net