David Axelrod promised big results from the Recovery Act in the summer of 2010. With the economy still weak two years later, he denied ever touting the recovery summer during an interview this morning.

“I wasn’t running around saying anything that other than we were going to be persistent, that it took years to get into this mess, it was going to take years to get [out],” Axelrod said this morning when Fox News’ Chris Wallace recalled that he was “running around, talking about recovery summer” in 2010.

“Well, you should show me the tape of me saying that,” Axelrod countered.

So, Mitt Romney’s campaign dug up the tape from 2010. “[M]any of the Recovery Act projects around the country are taking hold this summer, by design, that will involve a lot of private industry construction and so on,” Axelrod said on Meet the Press in June of 2010. ” So the combination of those things will help, and we hope the Congress will act expeditiously to get that done.”

Clearly, Axelrod didn’t use the term, “recovery summer,” but he did say that a recovery would be “taking hold” that summer.

In November of 2010, Axelrod added that “we have a recovery” during another Meet the Press interview that saw him acknowledge that the economy was still weak.

In June 2010, by the way, Axelrod — like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and President Obama after him — blamed the enduring weakness of the economy on state and local governments.

“[T]he state governments are lagging behind,” Axelrod said at the time, citing “the prospect that hundreds of thousands of school teachers, for example, are going to be laid off.”