Barney Frank mocks ‘Myth Romney’ on jobs

Tart-tongued Democratic Rep. Barney Frank mocked Mitt Romney's claims that his private-sector success makes him the better candidate to revive the economy, deriding the Republican candidate as "Myth Romney" in a speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday.

Frank joked that Romney, who served as governor of Frank's home state of Massachusetts, was portraying himself as a "superhero of job creation" and a "wizard of private-sector financial engineering."

"What we should have had as governor was Myth Romney. Myth Romney is a wonderful private-sector executive" who successfully harnessed his skills to foster job growth in Massachusetts, Frank said.

"We would have seen that in Massachusetts, [but] in fact the record is that during his term our job growth was only about 1.4 percent, which was a quarter of the national average," Frank said, adding that the state ranked 47th in job growth nationally.

"I wish Myth Romney had been governor of the state I lived in," said Frank. "But we had Mitt Romney.

"We need to do more to get the economy back," acknowledged the retiring congressman, but he argued that Republicans had gotten in the way of achieving that goal. Democrats were left "improving it over their objection, and over their obstruction," he said.

Frank, who came to the Democratic National Convention with his husband, opened his remarks with an insider's joke and some pointed remarks. He held up the gavel on the podium and quipped that it was "nice of them to leave a gavel out for me to make me feel nostalgic" for his chairmanship of the House Financial Services Committee.

The lawmaker said he had struggled to write his remarks, noting that he could have focused on "why it is that so many Republicans are afraid that my marriage will threaten theirs" or "why Mitt Romney thinks it's a bad thing that the president ended the war in Iraq."