Apparently, Mitt Romney, the former governor of the state of Massachusetts and a current presidential hopeful is not going to be taking the high road any time in the near future. So we can all settle in for a long year of people mud slinging about the topic near and dear to the hearts and minds of many Americans; the failing economy and how to get people back to work.

Romney made his way onto the obviously conservatively aligned Fox News and in an interview he blamed the President for the state of the current economy. Those remarks were repeated by the candidate in New Hampshire this week when he said,

“From break rooms to back offices to living rooms, I’ve heard stories of the Great Obama Recession. Of families getting by on less, of long planned-for retirements replaced by two jobs at minimum wage. It’s a long litany of dreams deferred and economic stress that quickly become family stress. I’ve heard stories that will break your heart.” The comments were originally reported by Fox Boston.

If the idea that one person can be singularly responsible for an economic downturn then you are not alone. These kinds of problems are created over years by a system that fails, not by one individual, and the problems with the recession began before the Obama years. Many economists, including one who won the Nobel Prize have stated that the government can only have a limited amount of impact on a failing economy, and that change needs to be more of a universal effort if recovery is going to be long lasting and have a strong impact. The idea that the government can change the free market is really only an invention of the 1970’s, and before that time no one would have expected the president to be able to change how businesses hire and fire their staff.

It also ignores the fact that this recession began in 2007, before President Obama came into office, and while a republican was in the white house.

President Obama, for his part, did make some remarks about Mitt Romney and his own history with layoffs. President Obama said according to autoblog, “ We know what Mitt Romney did when 1.4 million jobs were on the line – he opposed the rescue loan the president extended to avoid liquidation, and made clear he would let Detroit go bankrupt. It’s no wonder he did that, because when he was a corporate buyout specialist, he laid off thousands of workers, closed factories and outsourced jobs solely in order to create profits for himself and his partners.”

In the end, all that can be said is that this is a crying shame. No matter what side of the fence you happen to sit on ideologically what we can all agree on is that we need leaders who are going to take action about the problems, compromise in order to get things done and make things right for the people who put them where they are, instead of sitting around working on ways to lambast their opponents in order to make themselves look good.