If you listen to the way the presidential choices talk about each other, they’re both really awful and are both going to destroy the few jobs this country has left. And what if they’re both telling the truth?
President Obama is currently pointing out that Bain Capital bankrupted a steel company, and I guess he is implying that Mitt Romney may do the same to our country. That perhaps Romney as president will gut America, sell off its assets, and then take all that money and flee to Mexico — it’s certainly what I’d do if I were in his position. Also, Romney doesn’t care if there are jobs, because he doesn’t need one. He’s got enough money to live off for the rest of his life while he just sits around and rides his car elevator all day.
Of course, Mitt Romney is responding to this by pointing out Obama’s record on jobs while he’s been president. Obama always talks about the jobs he’s saved or created, but not the millions more jobs he’s annihilated or prevented. The only reason unemployment isn’t in double digits is that the economy is so bad that people have given up even looking for work. Under Obama’s leadership, we might eventually get to 100% employment, but there will be only five people working to support the rest of us as we sit around all depressed, watching daytime TV and gorging on Cheetos.
But as I watch Obama and Romney attack each other, I realize that they’ve actually stumbled onto a very useful way to view this election: Both Romney and Obama are going to destroy jobs, and it’s up to us to pick the one who will destroy the fewest.
In previous elections, we tried to choose the presidential candidate that would help us create and preserve jobs, but that’s like putting cats in charge of making sure no one pees on the sofa. As history has shown, politicians tend to be arrogant idiots, most of whom have no business experience and only think they know everything because they once read an article about job creation in The Economist. But the private sector is where jobs actually come from. So, really, it’s up to us to create the jobs and get the economy going and invent cute photo-sharing apps we can sell to Facebook for a billion dollars. And while we’re working as hard as we can, it’s up to the politicians to try to destroy all that hard work by blundering around with taxes and regulations, smothering us in their heavy-handed attempts to help. So to achieve economic success, we need to be be able to create more jobs than the moron politicians we elect can destroy.
So that’s the best way to look at the current candidates: We’re not picking the savior of our economy; we’re picking our opponent. So between Obama and Romney, we have to decide who we are most likely to succeed against in making jobs. It’s as if Batman gets to choose whether to deal with a crime spree from the Catwoman or the Joker. Both will be up to no good, but he also knows he’ll have a less miserable time dealing with the morally gray cat burglar versus fighting the homicidal maniac.
I think this frame of reference makes it easy to choose between the two. Obviously, Romney is Catwoman. Catwoman sometimes helps Batman and sometimes goes against him, and Romney has a record of being on both sides of a lot of issues. So as president, he may help us and stay out of the way as we create jobs, but eventually he’ll probably turn on us and enact some awful regulations that get in our way. We’ll think he’s on our side, and suddenly the royal crown we are protecting will be nowhere to be found and neither will Romney. I can’t believe we trusted you, Cat-Mitt!
Obama, on the other hand, is obviously the Joker. He’s a job killing maniac who can’t be reasoned with. There’s just no method to his madness. One moment he’s creating some giant new government program that no one wanted in Obamacare, and the next he’s spending a trillion dollars in “stimulus” money that has so little effect you’d swear he just put the money in a warehouse and burned it. If we’re going to elect a job killer, we should at least get one who can destroy jobs without having to spend trillions doing it. But Obama doesn’t care about anything logical or rational like the deficit or America’s long-term well-being. He just wants to watch the economy burn.
So there’s our choice: We can have untrustworthy Romney or more of Obama and his job-killing madness. And now I have an image of Romney in a skin-tight outfit in my head. Ah! Why did I pick this analogy?
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