“…[F]or 25 years, I lived and breathed business, and the economy, and jobs. I had successes, and failures. But each step of the way, I learned a little bit more about what makes our American system so powerful. You can’t learn that teaching constitutional law [at] the University of Chicago, all right?”
We’ll see if the perennially popular professor-as-pussy strategy works for Mitt Romney.
March 22nd, 2012 at 8:17AM
Meanwhile, our brilliant Current Occupant, with his deep and meaningful academic engagement with the the Constitution never managed to actually write a scholarly law article (you figure with his Critical Race Theory background he might have at least spun a good yarn or poem for publication). Instead, he just said this:
“We have subsidized oil companies for a century. We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we’ve got American resources, we are tapping into them. But they don’t need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel. They don’t need additional incentives. They are doing fine.”
Apparently he thinks the difference between the price of a barrel of oil and a gallon of gas is the eeeevil profit. This is so dumb on so many levels the mind boggles. Oil is currently $107 a barrel. And a barrel of oil is processed into several gallons of fuel gas (and other things, depends on the hydrocarbon mixture; average is ~20 gal gas per barrel of oil, I think. A barrel is 42 gallons).
So you might expect the O to have a grip on the Constitution, a debatable point given the evidence, but on economics and energy? Not so much. Maybe, just maybe, someone who has run a business and knows how things actually work might make a better president?
March 22nd, 2012 at 8:23AM
What Shane said.
March 22nd, 2012 at 9:58AM
Shane, Stephen: Sure – maybe someone who has run a business would make a better president. I just wonder about a leader who thinks that in itself calling someone a professor is an insult. Ironically, this business skews commie to me (and, like Romney, most of the Republican candidates attack people for being professors as if that in itself is a reason not to vote for them) – as in re-education camps for people who are intellectual and not sufficiently of the people…
March 22nd, 2012 at 10:24AM
Maybe, just maybe, someone who has run a business and knows how things actually work might make a better president?
Except that being the President of the United States of America is nothing like running a business. Indeed, as former Presidents of both parties have said consistently, it’s not like doing any other kind of job. So perhaps it’s time to retire this canard about Presidents-as-CEOs.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:29PM
Then, what Allen? Pull a Buckley and pick someone from the phone book? Let’s call it a canard after demonstrating it is false, not before.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:30PM
Sorry, Alan, not Allen.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:57PM
Then, what Allen? Pull a Buckley and pick someone from the phone book?
There is that. Or you could listen to what they have to say. But the idea that business is an especially good preparation for the Presidency is, as my former Senator Mr. Santorum has recently pointed out, bunk. There are no true equivalents to constitutional checks and balances in business. The goal of government is not profit, but maximal well-being. Romney might or might not make a good President if he gets the chance – I suspect he’d be harmless enough, if mediocre – but his business experience tells us nothing in advance.