Analysts in Massachusetts describe a governor personally engaged in economic development at the CEO level, attuned to the needs of in-state businesses weighing expansion, and ultimately successful in helping streamline his state’s unwieldy permit process. They also, however, describe a chief executive who raised corporate taxes three years in a row and did little to stop his state’s manufacturing slide beyond continuing existing worker-training programs.

Romney did even less to pitch his state around the country as a great place to live and work, a pledge he had campaigned on. “Everybody would agree that he and the administration fell way short on that promise,” says Michael Widmer, a former aide to Democratic Gov. Michael Dukakis who is now president of the nonpartisan, employer-funded Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. “He never really did do that much in the first two years. Then in the last two years he was campaigning for president.”…

Romney’s jobs record was nearly flat, ranging from a small gain or a small loss depending on how you measure. A comparison of annual employment totals for the year before he took office and 2006, the final year of his term, the method recommended by the Center for Labor Market Studies, shows a loss of 13,800 jobs—a .4 percent decrease from a baseline of 3,259,300 jobs in 2002.