Mitt Romney’s Crazy Ideas

The employment figures aren’t good: 69,000 new jobs were created in May, boosting unemployment to 8.2%. This is not so good for Barack Obama. These bad numbers have given Mitt Romney, the least inspiring, least inspired candidate for 2012, some crazy ideas.

Last Tuesday, in Las Vegas, not only did Romney appear with Donald Trump, he also proposed a silly amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The amusing Mr. Romney proposed that the Constitution be amended to require that all presidential candidates have a minimum of three years of business experience. Without this qualification, a candidate could not run for President. Romney said, “I’d like to have a provision in the Constitution that, in addition to the age of the president, and the citizenship of the president and the birthplace of the president being set by the Constitution, I’d like it also to say that the president has to spend at least three years working in business before he could become president of the United States.” If the Founding Fathers had come up with this provision, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and even Dwight Eisenhower – who spent his entire career in the army – would have been disqualified. There would have been no JFK and no Ronald Reagan. Even crazier, an investigation on C-Span of the best presidents revealed that six out of the 10 top presidents had no business experience. Conversely, two of the worst presidents of the twentieth century, according to the same study of historians, had business experience – George W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.

Romney is so hollow, so ready to compromise anything in order to be elected, that the only qualification that he can put up is his business experience. For 14 years at Bain Capital, Romney did not create jobs. According to a New York Times article, private equity consists solely of making money-saving deals, and that’s all. But when Romney arrived as governor of Massachusetts, he ranked 47 in job creation. Even though job creation at the national level under W – between 2003 and 2007 – was anemic, it was still five times higher than in Romney’s Massachusetts. In the last year of his term, Romney’s popularity was so low that he placed 48 out of 50 among all governors.

In contrast, Bill Clinton was the greatest job creator in the U.S. in the twentieth century, adding 23 million jobs. He could not read a business plan, but his political instinct was infallible, or close to it. That’s not the case with poor Romney. America doesn’t need a CEO but a leader with common sense, empathy for American citizens and courage. These are three traits whose absence is glaring in this Republican, who doesn’t even have the decency to avoid associating himself with the clown Donald Trump, a man who still doubts the President’s birthplace.