Hiring, Firing and Quitting

Mitt Romney is so convinced that he is going to be the Republican presidential nominee when all is said and done that he's already acting like a general election candidate, taking pot shots at President Obama and striking a more moderate tone in his discourse. Except his efforts to relate to ordinary people haven't helped him; indeed, they've hurt him. Trying to empathize with laid off workers, the noted corporate downsizer for hire said today that, like any worker, he too has had a fear of getting laid off. It is true that investment capitalists like Romney could easily be fired by the boards of their firms for not making enough money, but executives in Romney's position often get golden parachutes with their pink slips. They never have to worry about paying the mortgage on their mansions because they paid for it up front long ago in cash.

But what really got people's ears pricked up was Romney's insistence that health care should remain privatized because of the incentive for health insurance companies to provide quality services. It wasn't because of his failure to understand that many people in high-risk brackets have been unable to get health insurance for so long, at least until the Obama health care law was passed. It was because of his wording of how, under his version of health care, you can dump one insurance company for another: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me if someone doesn't give me the service I need."

Okay, so maybe Romney was merely expressing a desire to being competition to health insurance. But it sure didn't sound like it. His perceived insensitivity to workers has gotten so obvious that even Rick Perry and  Newt Gingrich have assailed him for his remarks, as well as his fellow Latter-Day Saint Jon Huntsman. "What's clear is he likes firing people," Huntsman said. "I like creating jobs."

Tellingly, Rick Santorum - a presidential candidate whose economic policy is pretty much an endorsement of serfdom - didn't take part in the Romney-bashing.

The Romney campaign is trying to present a kinder, gentler Mitt - a "New Romney." Right. New Romney is an English village in Kent.

Meanwhile, President Obama, on the side of the Democrats, has given me another reason to wish for a third presidential candidate to vote for in November rather than hire the President for another four years.  On December 31, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law, which allows the indefinite military detention of American citizens without trial - a clear violation of the Bill Rights and the an assault to our liberties right up (or down) there with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 at a time of possible war with Napoleonic France and Franklin Roosevelt's order to round up Japanese-Americans after the Pearl Harbor attack. "Under separate government powers expanded by the PATRIOT Act," Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Committee, writes, "non-violent dissent is increasingly classified as terrorism." Though President Obama issued a signing statement saying he would neither use nor recognize the bill's detention powers, any future president, Buttar adds, could "use the NDAA’s detention powers as a tool of political repression."

And what about that signing statement? Obama signed a bill with an unconstitutional provision, but then he violated his constitutional obligation to enforce a law that he signed? When you sign a bill as President., it's all or nothing. If Obama objected to the detention clause, as well he should have, he should have sent it back to Congress.

Perhaps that's why William Daley, the President's chief of staff, quit today; he couldn't stand living in the Carrollian Wonderland that is Washington these days. Reports out of Washington suggest that Daley hasn't been able to bring the order and sense of functionality to the White House that he was supposed to being when he arrived at the West Wing a year ago, although he claimed that he wanted to spend more time with his family. President Obama hopes to move forward and present a clear case for his re-election, though I'm increasingly having a hard time figuring out what it is.