In my homepage piece, I look at the factors that contributed to Massachusetts being 47th in the nation in job creation during Mitt Romney’s tenure:

“He came in between as the recovery was just about to begin, and then he left before the next recession hit. So the economy was beginning to recover, but we had been hit particularly hard by the dot-com bust,” observes Michael Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. Bolstering Widmer’s point is a 2007 study done by Massachusetts Institute for a New Economy that found the Bay State had the most severe job lossin light of the high-tech sector’s downfall. While the national average was a 2 percent job loss, Massachusetts suffered one of 6 percent.
Another factor is Massachusetts’s political climate. Romney didn’t get to work with a conservative GOP legislature, like Perry and Huntsman did. Instead, he faced such a hostile legislature that out of the over 800 line-item vetoes he made, the legislature overrode more than 700.
“Romney in one term couldn’t turn around that ship here with that kind of legislature,” observes Jim Stergois, who worked in the Romney administration and is now president of a Massachusetts think tank, the Pioneer Institute.

Full piece here.