Romney: 'It's Good, but It Could Be Better.'

I've been talking about this for a month now. An improving economy is the absolute worst thing for Mitt Romney. He has thus far staked his entire campaign on how the policies of President Obama have failed to restore American prosperity and Romney alone offers the secret ointment to cure our economic malaise. But as the months have drifted by and Romney's inability to focus on the general election, what, with having so much trouble securing just the republican nomination from Rick Santorum, who's been hard-lining social issues on the campaign trail, Romney has been unable to focus on the true issue of this election, the economy.

But that looks to be over. Romney cruised to victory in Tuesday night's primaries and that will secure half the delegates he needs for the nomination. With the nomination squarely in his sights, his focus is turning back to the President and the economy. Except while Romney's been hunkered down in far-right social conservatism land, the economy has continued to improve. Romney's arguments that the President has failed seems more vacuous day after day. So, what is the Romney campaign's answer? "It could be better."

The pivot is to say it's taking too long to recover from this recession, and that someone else could have done it better. Here's Jonathan Chait lambasting the Wall Street Journal for their noxious examination of the U.S. recovering from recessions. Besides the fact that the Journal's Ed Lazear skips over the '90's recession, because it'd be inconvenient for the Journal to talk about Clinton's tax hikes and their economic boost, he completely disregards the severity of the 2008 crash. Much like the Great Depression, the Great Recession was exceptional, and the culmination of a myriad series of events slowly crumbling the foundation of our economic infrastructure. It took years of damage to erode that foundation, and it will take years of careful repair to fortify it once again.

But here's something interesting: the presumed "could be better" candidate would ostensibly by Sen. John McCain, President Obama's opponent in 2008. McCain's economic plan was similar to the plan Britain's David Cameron employed: economic austerity. And, as Paul Krugman has noted repeatedly now that England--and the other nations that chose strict austerity after the recession--is entering a double-dip recession and unemployment is soaring, as an economy contracts and consumer spending pulls back, the government must make up that spending with economic stimulus in order to avoid further depressing the economy. McCain's policies, like Cameron's, would have prolonged the recession, and these are the same policies that Paul Ryan proposed in the House budget last week, a plan Mitt Romney has wholeheartedly endorsed. So, the rational, contextual view is, no, things could not be better with another candidate.