Romney To Obama In Michigan: Where Are The Jobs?

Mitt Romney today wrote an open letter to President Obama ahead of his visit to Michigan. The full letter will run in the Detroit Newsand the Detroit Free Press.

Dear Mr. President,

Welcome to Michigan. I have a simple question for you: where are the jobs?

As we enter the fourth year of your term, unemployment here is a staggering 9.3 percent. Nearly half a million men and women are fruitlessly seeking work. Many others have simply given up looking. They’ve given up hope.

I recognize, of course, as do all Americans, that you inherited an economic crisis. But you’ve now had three years to turn things around. The record of those three years is clear. Your policies have failed, and not only in Michigan, but across the nation. We have now had 35 consecutive months of unemployment over 8 percent, the longest such stretch since the Great Depression. Your policies, from Obamacare to your regulatory onslaught to your out-of-control spending on a pork-barrel stimulus bill to your crony-capitalism “green” investments in companies like the now-bankrupt Solyndra, have gotten in the way of economic recovery.

The results are a continuing tragedy for millions upon millions of people. I’ve met too many Americans who’ve lost their homes to foreclosure, who’ve had to put aside retirement plans and take work at minimum wage, whose dreams of sending their children to college have been shattered, whose lives have been upended. This is not the way it is supposed to be in America. This is not the way it needs to be.

It is plain that your policies have made things worse, not better. You pressed hard for legislation that your team promised would hold unemployment below 8 percent. The price tag on that legislation was $787 billion, which vastly expanded our nation’s deficit and contributed to an unprecedented downgrade of our nation’s credit rating. And yet for all the taxpayer money that was spent and borrowed, unemployment remains tragically high.

Mr. President, forgive me for being blunt, but when it comes to economic affairs, you’re out of your depth. Unlike you, I am not a career politician. Unlike you, I’ve spent more than two decades working in the private sector, starting new businesses and turning around failing ones. Undoing the damage you’ve done will be a daunting challenge. But I’ve learned a thing or two about how government policies can kill private investment and stifle job creation and I have a plan to get government out of the way and unleash the potential of the American people.

Mr. President, Four years ago, campaigning for the presidency, you declared that you were “absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Mr. President, the American people are tired of the grandiose promises. And they are even more tired of the paltry results.

Mr. President, your promises now ring hollow. If you have brought new ideas to Michigan for creating jobs, why have you waited three years to unveil them? Have you suddenly had a revelation, or is it because 2012 is an election year? Whatever the case, what you are offering Michigan now is too little, too late. What Michigan needs, and what the country needs, is not four more years of economic mismanagement and failed leadership, but a fundamental change in direction. I was born and raised in Michigan at a time when our state was the pride of America. With new leadership, Michigan can feel that pride once more.

Mitt Romney