Mitt Romney's campaign responds with unsubstantiated claims about jobs created by Bain Capital

Mitt Romney shows off some of the jobs cash created at Bain Capital Mitt Romney's campaign responds to the Obama campaign's new ad and website criticizing Romney's track record at Bain Capital:

Mitt Romney helped create more jobs in his private sector experience and more jobs as governor of Massachusetts than President Obama has for the entire nation.

But while we can establish Romney's job creation record as governor (lackluster: jobs grew at one-quarter the national rate in Massachusetts under Romney), there's never been an authoritative accounting of his private sector record, largely because Bain fails to fully disclose all of its investments. But with Romney staking his presidential ambitions on the claim that he was a job creator at Bain, that needs to change. As Joe Conason suggests, "Let's audit that." (Mitt Romney may not welcome this audit, as he's offered wildly inconsistent estimates for the number of jobs he's created.)

You could argue that the number of jobs created by Bain Capital isn't relevant to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. After all, Bain exists not to create jobs but to create profit. And that would be a valid point to make, but it's Mitt Romney himself who has pitched his Bain record as proof that he's a job creator. Romney hasn't staked his claim to the presidency on his record in Massachusetts: he's staked it on his record at Bain. So it's fair to hold Bain to a higher level of scrutiny than a typical company.

But this isn't just about Mitt Romney, and as much as he wants us to forget this fact, you can't really assess President Obama's economic track record without taking into account that he took office in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The economy was literally falling off a cliff, but  we're now growing again. Since unemployment peaked at 10 percent, we've added more than 4 million private sector jobs. We've lost a half million public sector jobs during that time, but that's primarily a result of Republican obstruction of aid to state and local governments. Still, that's 3.5 million total jobs compared with less than 50,000 created in Massachusetts under Romney during a period of economic expansion.

The bottom-line is that where numbers are available, Romney's pushback doesn't hold up. His claims about Bain are just that: claims. And we haven't even talked about the single worst aspect of Mitt Romney's economic plan: the fact that he represents a return to Bush's economic philosophy and the very same Republican trickle-down ideas that created our problems in the first place.