Mitt Romney last night on Hannity about “Winning the Future”:
Well, you know, he is trying awfully hard. The problem is he just doesn’t know what to do. He is misguided, almost everything he’s done has been the opposite of what he hoped to accomplish. And last night, really what he needed to do is to speak to two very big concerns that are on the minds of a lot of Americans. One is, is he going to get more jobs in this country? Is he going to find a way to have paychecks in people’s hands at the end of the week? And the second is, can he cut back on the extraordinary over-spending and deficits associated with government?
And frankly, he didn’t address those issues in a way that convinced people. There’s probably the biggest reality gap we’ve seen in a long time with the president. Because his words were all over the place, inspiring in some cases. But the reality of what he’s done was so different than what he said, that people just had, well, be as stunned as the people in the audience there, right there in the Congress. You didn’t hear a lot of applause. I think they were surprised.
HANNITY: I was surprised.
ROMNEY: The unemployment, with people out of work, with paychecks not in people’s hands, and with deficits at record levels, that the president seemed too cavalier in dealing with those issues.
HANNITY: Yes, I thought there was a disconnect here. An interesting thing, he said a lot of the right words. “Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation.” He talked about Edison, Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers, Google and Facebook. Then he goes on to describe a story how through a government loan this company was able to reinvent itself building new technology, et cetera, et cetera. And then he said, we need to get behind this innovation, we need to help pay for it. I didn’t know The Wright Brothers, Google, Facebook and Thomas Edison had, you know, the government assistance as they went out to create and build a better America.
ROMNEY: Sean, his economic education was very small in the first place. And he’s not being complete. He starts off by saying the right things as you indicated. His vision for an America which is the most attractive place for business in the world, where innovation powers our economy, those things are absolutely right. But then when he talks about what he would do to try to accomplish that vision, he’s completely wrong. He doesn’t understand that the entrepreneurial spirit of free men and women, unfettered from an excessive government regulatory and taxation environment is the right way to create jobs and to build the new enterprises that frankly had powered us in the past and can power us in the future.
So, you know, it is sad to watch in some respects. Because obviously, we care very deeply what is happening with the country, we want people to get back to work. But he just doesn’t know what the right things are that he’s got to do to make that happen. He has put in place over the last two years about the most anti-investment, anti-business, anti-jobs regimen we’ve seen probably the last couple of decades.
HANNITY: Yes. I just mentioned CBO numbers come out and for the 2011, we’re going to have $1.5 trillion deficit, that’s on top of the $3.4 trillion he’s assumes or created since he’s been president. The housing collapse we have has now set a new record of — 487 year record in the country right now. There was an AP article, The Hill came out with this, his spending binge has American debt in a free fall. We’ve accumulated $1 trillion in new debt just in the last seven months. How to you stop this? And is repealing Obamacare, has that got to be at the top of the list?
ROMNEY: Oh, sure. A huge new spending entitlement for the federal government is absolutely the wrong idea. And his idea of running spending up to the highest level in American history and then saying, why don’t we freeze it there, it’s almost laughable. Given the scale of the challenges we face. But you have to cry instead when you think of all the people that are suffering because of it.
Look, when I came in as governor, and obviously a state is a much smaller entity. But when I came in, I recognized that we couldn’t keep our spending up and meet our obligations. And so, we said very simply, we’re not just going to slow down the growth of spending or freeze it at the current level, we are going to cut spending. We’re going to reduce state expenditures in a series of programs. And we didn’t do it across the board, there are some things like safety, public safety that have to be protected.
But gosh, this is a time when we’ve got to be cutting back on the excesses of government and encouraging the private sector, small businesses, entrepreneurs to know that their confidence in the future should be real and solid given incentives for hiring, for investing, for growing, that’s what America needs. And two years with the wrong direction has really cost a lot of people a lot of pain and suffering.