him GOVERNOR NO.
The joke was that he spent more time in NH (at his lake house) than he did in MA.
Key paragraphs in that piece:
But on closer examination, the record as governor he alluded to looks considerably less burnished than Mr. Romney suggested. Bipartisanship was in short supply; Statehouse Democrats complained he variously ignored, insulted or opposed them, with intermittent charm offensives. He vetoed scores of legislative initiatives and excised budget line items a remarkable 844 times, according to the nonpartisan research group Factcheck.org. Lawmakers reciprocated by quickly overriding the vast bulk of them.
That's the GOVERNOR NO label, right there. One item he "line item vetoed" was an inspection of the Ted Williams tunnel, because he thought it would cost too much and, after all, the tunnel was brand spanking new. One of the ceiling tiles in that tunnel gave way and crushed a car, killing a newlywed woman on her way to the airport, and the state had to pay twenty five million for Mittsy's "penny wise/pound foolish" attitude. It was later discovered that there was a serious fault with the epoxy that held the fittings that kept the tiles in place, something that this inspection would have revealed. At the end of the day, all of the tile fittings had to be replaced anyway. Had the inspection taken place, that would have happened sooner and no one would have been killed.
Mr. Romney lobbied successfully to block changes in the state’s much-admired charter school program, but his own education reforms went mostly unrealized. His promise to lure new business and create jobs in a state that had been staggered by the collapse of the 2000 dot-com boom never quite bore fruit; unemployment dropped less than a percentage point during his four years, but for most of that time, much of the decline was attributed to the fact that any new jobs were being absorbed by a shrinking work force.
He promised to bring his Big Business Buddies in to create jobs--but he NEVER delivered on that empty promise, and the state dropped to forty seventh in the nation in job creation. So many people left the state that WE LOST A CONGRESSIONAL SEAT. That's why Barney Frank retired earlier than he planned--it was his seat that took the hit.
He also RAISED the "circuit breaker" exemption during his tenure, at a time when home prices were going through the roof. Thus, little old ladies living in the home they bought with their husbands for twenty grand found themselves living in homes that were over-valued at four or five hundred grand, and that "high" value knocked them out of the "circuit breaker" program (it gives a property tax break to fixed-income elderly). This caused old people to have to choose between things like winter heat or paying taxes--it really screwed a lot of people over and some people had to give up their family homes. When Deval Patrick came in, that circuit breaker exemption went back down.
This piece on the second page--do click through, it is worth it--shows him to be an ASSHOLE:
Mr. Romney proved to have a taste for vetoes, killing legislative initiatives in his first two years at more than twice the rate of his more popular Republican predecessor...Some seemed almost designed to rankle legislators: one rejected an increase in disability payments to a police officer who had slipped on an ice patch. Others reflect his ramrod-straight views on ethics and government waste — knocking down a special pension deal for a state legislator; rejecting a subsidy to Medicaid payments so nursing homes could provide kosher meals to Jewish residents.
“He seemed to take great delight in vetoing bills,” recalled his director of legislative affairs, John O’Keefe. "Some of the bills we would chuckle when we wrote the veto message.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/us/politics/romney-claims-of-bipartisanship-as-governor-face-challenge.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&hp
= new reply since forum marked as read
