Bruce Springsteen, "Death To My Hometown"

To-ing and fro-ing on the President's recent round of attack ads assailing Mitt Romney's time at Bain Capital. The President has doubled down, which I suppose he ought to; Romney, meanwhile, can't justify his own promotion of his Bain time as a résumé asset.

This is all cotton candy, really. It's a bullshit discussion because Romney's big argument, that running a business is somehow a qualification for him to run a country, is complete horseshit. But it's horseshit that some people gobble up with--forgive me--shit-eating grins because of the way we fetishize laissez-faire capitalism these days. So the President's counter-offensive, to the extent it's factually accurate is a thing-that-should-not-be, a rebuttal to incoherency; I guess he has to make it, it just seems pointless.

George W. Bush had private-sector experience, and he was a shitty president. You know I don't think much of Ronald Reagan, but conservatives love him, and he never ran a business a day in his life so far as I know. Conservatives loathe Jimmy Carter, and he and his wife successfully turned a struggling family farm into a thriving agricultural concern. Abraham Lincoln, arguably America's greatest president, was a complete failure as a businessman during the brief period--less than a year--he made a go of it, which may have contributed to his seeking public-sector employment. I mean, I could go on and on and on.

At some point in my lifetime, this bizarre meme entered American popular politics, that "business experience" somehow had anything at all to do with effective public service. It may have been during Ross Perot's campaign, when the two chief things anybody could say about Perot were "successful businessman" and "batshit crazy", and one of those would have looked pretty funny on a campaign poster. And now we have lots and lots of aspiring and serving politicians who will talk about their corporate or small business experience and say it gives them some kind of special insight into how things work; and this weird converse to that, which is that perfectly experienced public sector people will minimize their experience working in government and nonprofits (ironically, even Romney does this: he doesn't hide his gubernatorial service or work with nonprofits, and will even mention it himself sometimes, but it doesn't seem to be something he focuses on).

The United States is not a corporation. The United States is not a business. Corporations may have charters, but they don't have constitutions. The point in having a corporation is to engage in business in a manner that is profitable and limits the personal liability of investors. The point in having a government is to do things like promote the general welfare, keep the peace, enforce the laws, defend the nation from hostile powers, etc. These aren't even apples and oranges we're comparing, these are animals and minerals we're trying to hold side-to-side.

If Mitt Romney gets elected President, he's not going to be able to lay off Congress because their division isn't showing significant growth over the last quarter. If he's able to get a damn thing done (for good or ill), he'll most likely fall back on the cat-herding experience he racked up as a state governor before he needs a single thing he might have learned at Bain Capital.

Most likely, we have to say, because the truth is there's actually no job in the world, public or private, that offers any real preparation for being President of the United States. This is the most absurd thing about the kinds of discussions people generally have about whether one's résumé shows one has what it takes to lead the free world. The Presidency is a job where you're having a nice little photo op with a bunch of little kids and trying to promote your educational agenda (because you want to go down in history as the education president, natch), and some guy walks over and whispers in your ear that persons unknown have just wrecked a bunch of passenger jets full of people into three buildings and a fourth plane is unaccounted for. It's the job where you're having a nice enough Sunday evening when someone knocks on the door to let you know the Japanese have just bombed the fuck out of Pearl Harbor and they don't know how many men, ships and planes have been lost but apparently we're at war, sir. It's a job where your first day at work can involve standing in the back of a plane with one hand on the Bible and your predecessor's brains all over his wife who's standing next to you, and someone's going to get back to you in a minute-or-less when they find out whether or not there are Soviet bombs on their way or do we need to invade Cuba now or was it just Some Random Guy-With-A-Gun.

If you want to talk about résumés, I guess I have to point out that there's exactly one job on the entire Earth that will prepare you for serving as President Of The United States Of America, and you'll be shocked to read that job is serving as the fucking President Of The United States Of America. So if we want to make this a discussion about job experience over anything else, President Obama's already won that discussion. There may be a salient and even a prevailing argument that Mitt Romney's inexperience is trumped by other considerations--I'm not buying, but I'll let you make it if you want. But the idea that Romney is more qualified because he was a successful capitalist a while back when isn't it.

I wish in vain we could move on, already.