President Barack Obama has promised a greater use of executive orders but his actions won't provide any permanent solutions, says the man who lost to him in the 2012 general election.
"I guess he's trying very hard to get something done," Mitt Romney said Monday on Fox News Channel's "Hannity."
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"He didn't really have an agenda for his second term and he's groping to find one," Romney said.
Obama faces a House led by Republicans and the possibility of losing the Senate in November. So, he has said he has a pen and a phone with which he can get his agenda on track – the pen for signing executive orders.
But without the benefit of legislation, Romney said, Obama's executive orders won't have a long life. Another president can reverse them or Congress can write a law to undo them, he said.
"You're not accomplishing a real legacy as a president unless you can work with people in both parties," Romney said. "Knock some heads together if they have to be knocked together."
Obama has lost the trust of the public, says a Washington Post-ABC News Poll showing that 63 percent of those surveyed have no confidence he can make the right decisions for the country.
Romney said the trust was lost partly because of Obama's broken promise that people could keep health insurance plans they liked. But even earlier, people saw the economy was not rebounding as they had been led to believe just before the 2012 election.
Answering charges that he had compared Obama to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the weekend, Romney clarified that he had said only that Putin had outmaneuvered Obama when it looked like the United States was being boxed into a war with Syria because of Obama's "red line" comments.
Obama is a "good guy," Romney said, while Putin is a "thug" who jails dissidents.
"Our president's a lot better president than President Putin," Romney said, "but it breaks my heart to watch President Putin outmaneuver him on the world stage."
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