HILLSBORO, NH -- Wrapping up a weeklong effort to paint President Obama as a heavy-spending "old-school liberal," Mitt Romney stood here Friday before a half-built bridge, an example of what he claimed was the failure of the president's stimulus program.
"This is the absolute bridge to nowhere if there ever was one," Romney said of the Sawyer Bridge, a handsome stone archway, restored with stimulus dollars, that ends abruptly several yards before reaching the far side of the Contoocook River. "That's your stimulus dollars at work: A bridge that goes nowhere."
Romney regularly assails the president's stimulus package on the campaign trail, and today was no exception as he deployed a new number -- what he claimed was the cost per job created of the $787 billion dollar stimulus.
"They're required to report these things and they did an analysis and of course they stretched I'm sure as far as they could as to how many jobs they saved and how many jobs they created. Then they take that number and divide it into the size of the stimulus. It turns out the cost per job was $317,000," Romney said.
Romney, whose remarks today were uncharacteristically brief, clocking in around nine minutes, was greeted in Hillsboro by a small but vocal group of pro-Obama protesters, who chanted "Four more years" and "O-ba-ma" audibly throughout his remarks.
Romney laughed off the group in with his opening lines.
"We have behind us a Greek chorus, and I say that because they remind us this president is leading us towards Greece," Romney said. "And one reason we're going to get rid of him is to make sure we don't have the kind of deficits that lead to Greece. So I hope they keep up with their Greek chorus over there."