Buried in Mitt Romney’s 160-page jobs plan announced Tuesday is a chart of recent recessions and their subsequent recoveries that briefly made the rounds on Twitter — mostly pushed by progressives who found the image to be shockingly misleading.
Not so, says the Romney campaign — the chart is perfectly clear. All you have to do is look.
Here’s the chart in question:
You can see a larger version here.
Some looked at the above graph and were instantly struck that Romney was calling the years 2007-2009 the “Obama Recovery.” Even a rudimentary knowledge of Wikipedia would let the average cyberhoud suss out that for most of that time, George W. Bush was in office. So claiming the period for Obama would be more than little disingenuous.
And the Romney folks say that’s not what they did at all. They suggest critics take a look at the legend, which explains that the red line represents the recession (the 2007-2009) and the blue line is the 24 months after the recession was over — in this case, 2009-2011 when Obama was fully in charge.
There are doubtless many things people will quibble with in Romney’s massive jobs plan. And misleading/confusing charts may be one of them. But it seems Romney is not trying to claim the years 2007-2009 for Obama, as Twitter outrage suggested today.
Evan McMorris-Santoro
Evan McMorris-Santoro has covered politics for TPM since 2009. Before that, he was a reporter at National Journal’s Hotline covering election 2008. He started his career covering local politics at newspapers in TN and his native NC.
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