Mitt Romney continued to hammer President Obama over a disappointing August jobs report in his first television appearance since the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention, saying that the numbers were the latest in a long string of troubling economic news.
"The White House says you can't just look at monthly numbers — if you, if you look over the last several quarters, last several years you look at a continued pattern: we're not creating jobs, we need to create to put Americans back to work," Romney said during an interview with Fox News. "For every net new job created about four people dropped out of the workforce. So we're going in the wrong direction."
The Republican presidential nominee went on to cite declining wages, concluding the August jobs report was "another continuation of a very bleak news on the employment front."
The economy added
96,000 jobs in August, and unemployment fell from 8.3 to 8.1 percent. But economists had expected around 150,000 jobs to be added, and the 368,000 people who dropped out of the workforce last month is the highest amount in years.
Romney also critiqued Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention Thursday evening, saying the address contained nothing "that gives confidence that the president knows what he is doing when it comes to jobs and economy."
"As a matter of fact he hardly even mentioned jobs or the economy," Romney said. "And for that matter, there is really nothing that he has done in the last three and a half, four years that gives confidence he knows what he's doing with regards to the jobs and the economy anyway."
Romney also said he was disappointed the president did not include more policy specifics.
"What we saw and what we read with regards to last night's speech was a president making new promises which he also will be unable to fulfill and no new plan. No new ideas. No new 'here's how we're going to get the economy going, here are the specifics, what it takes,' nothing there," Romney said.
But while Romney sharpened his attack on the president's economic record, he also played defense against former President Clinton's assertion in his highly regarded prime-time address that no president would have been able to quickly pull the country out of the recession.
"Well, I could have done a heck of a lot better job than this president has," Romney said. "I wasn't elected so that is kind of moot. The point when this president was elected he and his team announced to the American people by now we would have 5.4 percent unemployment."
Romney also addressed criticism lobbied at his acceptance speech last week in Charlotte, N.C. Romney did not once mention the word "troops" — a fact Democrats highlighted repeatedly on the last night of their convention.
"When you give a speech you talk about the things you think are important and I described in my speech and my commitment to a strong military, unlike the president's decision to cut our military," Romney said. "And I didn't use the word troops. I used the word military. I think they refer to the same thing."
