Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney will formally announce his candidacy today with a speech that will largely attack the failures of what he dubs the Obama economy.

A few years ago, Americans did something that was, actually, very much the sort of thing Americans like to do: We gave someone new a chance to lead; someone we hadn't known for very long, who didn't have much of a record but promised to lead us to a better place, prepared remarks published by Politico read. Romney will later add that Obama has failed America.

With the unemployment rate still hovering around 9 percent and housing prices plunging to a new low, the presidential election is likely to serve as a referendum on Obama's economic policy; as Binyamin Applebaum pointed out in the New York Times, no candidate since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has been elected when the unemployment rate exceeded 7.2 percent.

Romney will also take aim at what he charaterizes as excessive government programs, vowing to repeal Obama's healthcare plan -- despite enacting a statewide healthcare plan when he was governor -- and saying he will return authority to states in how they handle government programs.

Government under President Obama has grown to consume almost 40 percent of our economy, Romney will say. We are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy. I will cap federal spending at 20 percent or less of the GDP and finally, finally balance the budget.

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