My Secret Plan to Quiet Mitt Romney

I wonder if many of you remember Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.

Tricky Dick was going for his second term and campaigned hard on this secret strategy to bring the boys home from the jungle death trap. He couldn't say what it was because, obviously, it was secret and had to be kept from our enemies.

The silent majority must have felt sorry for Nixon because they gave him the benefit of the doubt and voted him back in over McGovern. Nixon, after all, had inherited the war from Johnson, who, by the way, was the peace candidate in 1964. It's confusing since everyone is for peace, just as everyone is for democracy, and just as everyone is for jobs.

What's all this got to do with today's headlines and the New York Times?

The Times is running its second, unless I've missed one, big feature on the candidates for 2012, those sad yet hopeful characters who will spend the next two years trying to figure out what we want. This one is on Mitt Romney, who the story says, is going to bet on jobs. He says he knows how to create jobs because he is a businessman.

The writer waves away last week's real jobs report, which shows solid growth, and quotes Romney saying, "I like President Obama but he doesn't have a clue how jobs are created." No one asks Romney how he explains this job growth.

I agree with him. I like Obama. And I don't believe Obama knows how to create jobs. But that's not where it ends. I don't believe anyone knows how to create jobs, and I don't think it's possible for a human being in the White House to decree an economic recovery and have one materialize. Economics give us a puzzle that remains out of reach for the human mind.

But Romney's logic is ridiculous. A businessman is someone who knows how to sell something and make a profit. He has to decide what to sell, figure out how to get it made and advertise it so that you and I will shell out real money to buy it. A businessman who tells you he is in it to give you a job is a liar.

In general the Republican argument for almost everything is ridiculous. The answer to every problem is always the same: cut taxes, and do some other stuff to repair the allegedly damaged moral fiber of the country.

The real problem is the media's refusal to do their jobs. Like most political reporting, there are a lot of words in a steady stream of sound bites but no attempt to make candidates say exactly what they mean.

You read halfway down the story and see that "so far Mr. Romney has offered few specific details beyond general Republican philosophies, saying only that the country needs 'to believe in free enterprise, capitalism, limited government, federalism.'" I decode statements like that into this: Read no further.

So here we are, almost two years away from Election Day, describing in great detail what Mitt Romney sounds like. At least I haven't read in the Times a lot of complaining about the early start to presidential campaigns.

To Quiet Critics, Romney Puts 2012 Focus on Jobs