"Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are?"

"Just how stupid does Mitt Romney think we are?"    That's the opening line in Paul Krugman's New York Times opinion piece today.

He cited the latest blatant example of Romney's twisting the facts to accuse Obama of everything that's wrong with the economy.   If you are totally naive and unquestioning, you might swallow it all.  But, Krugman has more faith in the American people than that.

Romney was visiting a closed drywall factory in Ohio, and he tried to portray it as the symbol of Obama's failed economic policies.

But the inconvenient fact is that the drywall factory closed while George W. Bush was president.    Yes, Romney admits, but it would have reopened by now except for Obama's failed policies.

Romney constantly talks about job losses under Obama's administration.   Krugman responds:

"Yet all of the net job loss [during Obama's term] took place in the first few months of 2009, that is, before any of the new administration’s policies had time to take effect. So the Ohio speech was a perfect illustration of the way the Romney campaign is banking on amnesia, on the hope that voters don’t remember that Mr. Obama inherited an economy that was already in free fall.

"How does the campaign deal with people who point out the awkward reality that all of the “Obama” job losses took place before any Obama policies had taken effect? The fallback argument — which was rolled out when reporters asked about the factory closure — is that even though Mr. Obama inherited a deeply troubled economy, he should have fixed it by now. That factory is still closed, said a Romney adviser, because of the failure of Obama policies “to really get this economy going again.”

"Actually, that factory would probably still be closed even if the economy had done better — drywall is mainly used in new houses, and while the economy may be coming back, the Bush-era housing bubble isn’t."

Krugman goes on to say that Romney doesn't want to remind people of the failure of the Bush policies, because what he is advocating himself is essentially a return to those same policies.

In addition, Krugman points out, much of the job loss also has to do with massive layoffs of teachers and other state and local government employees -- and the worst of those losses have been in states controlled by Republican legislatures and governors.

In contrast, the private sector has recovered almost all of the job losses experienced during those first few months of the Obama administration.

Bottom line:   Krugman makes the case that Obama has done better with the economy than George W. Bush did and than the Republicans in control of state and local governments have done.

Now the job is to get this corrected message out there to the voters.   Obama and the Democrats have a lot of remedial work to do to correct all these distortions and lies that Republicans have been peddling -- with a pretty cooperative media, thus far.

Ralph