and at Mitt Romney Won the Debate. But Why? 4OKT12 http://bucknacktssordidtawdryblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/mitt-romney-won-debate-but-why-4okt12.html
A big fact that screams for an explanation from mitt robme romney is if he was such a great governor why is he loosing the vote in Massachusetts????? This from the New York Times.....
By MICHAEL WINES
BOSTON — He came into office with a mandate to shake things up, an
agenda laden with civics-book reforms and a raging fiscal crisis that
threatened to torpedo both. He sparred with a hostile legislature and
suffered a humiliating setback in the midterm elections. As four years
drew to a close, his legacy was blotted by anemic job growth, sagging
political popularity and — except for a landmark health care overhaul bill — a record of accomplishment that disappointed many.
That could be the Barack Obama that Mitt Romney depicted in Wednesday’s presidential debate
as an ineffective and overly partisan leader. But it could also be Mitt
Romney, who boasted of a stellar record as Massachusetts governor,
running a state dominated by the political opposition.
Mr. Romney did score some successes beyond his health care legislation,
notably joining a Democratic legislature to cut a deficit-ridden budget
by $1.6 billion and revamping a troubled school building fund. Some
outside experts and former aides say his administration excelled at the
sorts of nuts-and-bolts efficiencies that make bureaucracies run better,
like streamlining permit approvals and modernizing jobs programs.
As a Republican governor whose legislature was 87 percent Democratic,
Mr. Romney said in Wednesday’s debate, “I figured out from Day 1 I had
to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done.”
The result, he said, was that “we drove our schools to be No. 1 in the
nation. We cut taxes 19 times.”
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.
The big-ticket items that Mr. Romney proposed when he entered office in
January 2003 went largely unrealized, and some that were achieved turned
out to have a comparatively minor impact. A wholesale restructuring of
state government was dead on arrival in the legislature; an ambitious
overhaul of the state university system was stillborn; a consolidation
of transportation fiefs never took place.
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.
Mr. Romney won lawmakers’ consent to streamline a tangled health and
human services bureaucracy, but the savings amounted to but $7 million a
year. He entered office considering an eight-state compact to battle climate change, but left office outside the consortium, saying it cost too much.
“He put on the table in his inaugural address, and then in his budget, a
series of proposed reforms like civil service reform, pension reform —
going right to the heart of the lion’s den,” Michael Widmer, president
of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation,
said in an interview. But excepting health care, “he never followed up.
There was a handful of successes, but there was never a full-blown or
focused program in the sense of saying, ‘Here’s our vision.’ ”
Mr. Romney’s former aides vigorously disagree.
“That’s an overwrought type of critique,” said Timothy Murphy, the
health and human services secretary under Mr. Romney. “If you take a
look at the things the governor set out to do, we accomplished a lot.
The budgets were more than balanced — we generated surpluses.”
And, he said, “We did pass the most consequential piece of health care legislation in this state in 25 years.”
Mr. Romney was pushing on an open door on the 2006 initiative —
Democrats had long dreamed of providing health coverage to almost every
resident.
Jane Edmonds, who headed the state’s Labor and Workforce Development
agency, recounted a meeting at the start of Mr. Romney’s term in which
he handed out a list of campaign promises to his staff and ordered them
carried out within four years.
“My opinion is that he delivered on almost all those promises,” she
said. “We had 8 or 10 of them and we carried them all out.”
Some of Mr. Romney’s harshest critics concede his competence and his
grasp of Massachusetts’ problems and needs. Many of the initiatives he
took into office were arguably nonpartisan; he brought to the job the
same gimlet-eyed scrutiny of costs and revenues that he employed as an
investment manager to spot potentially profitable companies.
But in contrast to his statements in the debate, many say, Mr. Romney
neither mastered the art of reaching across the aisle nor achieved
unusual success as governor. To the contrary, they say, his relations
with Democrats could be acrimonious, and his ability to get big things
done could be just as shackled as is President Obama’s ability to push
his agenda through a hostile House of Representatives.
Mr. Romney could be appealing and persuasive, they say. But he also
could display a certain political tone-deafness and a failure to nurture
the constituencies he needed to make his initiatives succeed.
Mr. Romney promoted his record on Wednesday as a bipartisan leader by
noting that he met regularly with the Democratic leadership of the
Massachusetts legislature. But that apparently was not enough to keep
afloat a relationship that had been rancorous from the beginning.
In the opening months of his tenure, Mr. Romney vetoed a House plan to
create new committees and raise legislative pay, and the legislators
rejected his flagship proposal, a nearly 600-page plan to overhaul the
state bureaucracy. “They had a deteriorating relationship during the
first two years,” said Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor and
expert on state politics at Tufts University.
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, William F. Weld, The Boston Globe
reported in 2004.
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.”
By 2004, the second year of his term, Mr. Romney was provoked enough to
mount an unprecedented campaign to unseat Democratic legislators,
spending $3 million in Republican Party money and hiring a nationally
known political strategist, Michael Murphy, to plan the battle.
The effort failed spectacularly. Republicans lost seats, leaving them
with their smallest legislative delegation since 1867. Democratic
lawmakers were reported to have been deeply angered by the campaign’s
tactics.
On close scrutiny, some of the bipartisan successes that Mr. Romney
claimed in the Wednesday debate turn out to by peppered with asterisks.
On education, Mr. Romney was correct in stating that Massachusetts
students were ranked first in the nation during his tenure. Students in
grades four and eight took top honors in reading and mathematics on the
2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress.
However, educators largely credit an overarching reform of state schools
10 years earlier under Governor Weld. The reforms doubled state
spending on schools and brought standards and accountability to
administrators and students.
“Governor Romney does not get to take the credit for achieving that No. 1
ranking,” said Mike Gilbert, field director for the nonprofit Massachusetts Association of School Committees, “but it did happen while he was in office.”
Mr. Romney’s claim that he was responsible for 19 separate tax cuts is
also technically accurate, but not the full story. In 2005, for example,
Mr. Romney’s administration wrote legislation refunding $250 million in
capital gains taxes — but the bill came only in response to a court
ruling that the taxes had been illegally withheld in 2002.
Many of the other tax cuts were first proposed by the legislature, not
Mr. Romney, and others were routine extensions of existing tax
reductions or were one-day sales tax holidays.
Mitt
Romney has picked as his running mate 42 year-old Republican
Congressman Paul Ryan (R-WI), the architect of the GOP budget, which the
New York Times has described as “