Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Mitt: Attracting Business Not My Job

Today's Boston Herald has an editorial criticizing Governor Mitt Romney for claiming that he did not have a team in place that could attract businesses to Massachusetts. The Herald editors rightly point out that Romney had no problem going out of state to boost his own presidential stock, so claiming that there was no one available to promote the Bay State is a little far-fetched.

Fresh from his weekend appearances in Memphis and Iowa, Gov. Mitt Romney went before the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce yesterday and without even blushing said that what Massachusetts really needs is a cadre of 20 sales reps to sell it to businesses looking to expand.

In what was likely his last appearance before the chamber, Romney apparently saw no irony in having spent the past several months selling himself to Republicans across the country (often by disparaging his blue state roots) and yet wanting a team of hired guns to sell the state for him.
Indeed. Romney could have spent the past three years selling the state, but instead he was only interested in promoting himself. Now he has the gall to say that someone should have been responsible for promoting Massachusetts. It seems to me that that would have been a great job for, say, the Governor -- especially one that spent so much time out of state anyway. This explains why Mitt's plan to bring jobs to Massachusetts consists of little more than a lame web page. He apparently was waiting for some slick marketing team to do it for him all this time.