Romney is once again trying to play by a different set of rules. When he ran for governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney promised to create jobs, touting his decades of experience in the private sector as the No. 1 reason why he was fit to lead. Instead, he led his state to the bottom—to a staggering 47th out of 50 in job creation. Under Romney, Massachusetts’s economy grew at a slower rate than the national economy every year he was in office. Manufacturing jobs were lost at twice the national average, which was the third-worst record in the country. And as jobs disappeared, a quarter of a million people left the state. That is an indisputably bad record. So his team is scrambling to come up with an excuse for why Romney failed to deliver on his promise to create jobs in Massachusetts, and here’s what they’ve come up with: Romney inherited a bad economy and should only be judged on the state’s economic performance the last year he was in office. Oh, really? By that standard, the Romney campaign should judge the President on the 4.3 million private-sector jobs his policies have created since he turned the economy around from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Or, as Steve Benen over at MSNBC’s Maddow Blog notes , “If Romney’s to be congratulated for inheriting an economy that was struggling but then turning things around a little, by that identical standard, he ought to be patting Obama on the back for a job well done.” After all, for a fair comparison, President Obama has created five times more jobs in Massachusetts than Romney did as governor over the first 39 months of their terms. And even if you only compare one year, over the past 12 months, the number of U.S. jobs has grown by 1.8 million nationwide—a 1.4 percent increase. In Romney’s last year in office, the number of jobs grew by 40,500, a 1.3 percent increase. But the real point here is that Romney is once again trying to play by a different set of rules. He doesn’t think he should be held to the same standard he and his team have used to attack the President’s record—and that undercuts the very argument he’s used against President Obama’s handling of our economic crisis.

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Mitt Romney’s double standard