Happy days are here again!
Three months after Mitt Romney said Washington experience does not translate into economic wisdom, the former Republican presidential contender was on television Tuesday touting the economic credentials of John McCain in part on the strength of his congressional tenure.
The change comes as Romney tries to boost his former rival’s chances of winning the White House — and after he acknowledged he would be interested in serving on the GOP ticket if McCain asked…
“I can tell you that for a person who’s spent over 25 years in Washington, D.C., working on economic policies from the days of (Ronald) Reagan and throughout the current time, Sen. McCain is very well aware of the spending programs in Washington, which ones need to be cut back, which ones need to be grown. He understands also how to relieve the pressure on the American taxpayer,” Romney told CNN just hours before McCain delivered an economic address in Pittsburgh…
“This is an individual who, well, if you take Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s experience and multiply it by 10, you still haven’t caught up with Sen. McCain when it comes to experience on the economy,” he said.
Yet questioning McCain’s economic credentials was the centerpiece of Romney’s recent Florida primary campaign. It continued through their Feb. 5 Super Tuesday showdown, which McCain won and forced Romney from the race.
For example, on Jan. 25 in Pensacola, Fla., Romney mocked McCain for equating his Senate tenure and committee chairmanship with Romney’s prior work in the private sector as a venture capitalist and outside the Beltway as governor of Massachusetts.
“Now he’s engaging in ‘Washington talk,'” Romney said of McCain, jabbing as the senator’s self-professed “straight-talk” manta. “‘Washington talk’ says that somehow, because you’ve been in Washington, and you’ve been on a committee, that you somehow know about how the jobs of this country have been created.”
