The Michael Scott Candidate

Jason Linkins had a brilliant, nee, prophetic article up on HuffPo yesterday comparing Republican Presidential nomination candidate Mitt Romney with Michael Scott of NBC's The Office. Funny idea, and well-proven one day later as Mitt, a man of immense wealth, compared himself to the unemployed citizens he was meeting on that long campaign trail:

Mitt Romney sat at the head of the table at a coffee shop here on Thursday, listening to a group of unemployed Floridians explain the challenges of looking for work. When they finished, he weighed in with a predicament of his own.

“I should tell my story,” Mr. Romney said. “I’m also unemployed.”

He chuckled. The eight people gathered around him, who had just finished talking about strategies of finding employment in a slow-to-recover economy, joined him in laughter.

“Are you on LinkedIn?” one of the men asked.

“I’m networking,” Mr. Romney replied. “I have my sight on a particular job.”

Ho ho ho! That Mitt, he's just like one of us. Only, he's the guy who got rich making people unemployed (per Stephen Colbert via Steve Benen):

“You see, Romney made a Mittload of cash using what’s known as a leveraged buyout. He’d buy a company with ‘money borrowed against their assets, groomed them to be sold off and in the interim collect huge management fees.’ Once Mitt had control of the company, he’d cut frivolous spending like jobs, workers, employees, and jobs. […]

“Because Mitt Romney knows just how to trim the fat. He rescued businesses like Dade Behring, Stage Stories, American Pad and Paper, and GS Industries, then his company sold them for a profit of $578 million after which all of those firms declared bankruptcy."

And as Governor:

Complicating matters, during Romney’s only service in public office, his state’s record on job creation was “one of the worst in the country.” Adding insult to injury, “By the end of his four years in office, Massachusetts had squeezed out a net gain in payroll jobs of just 1 percent, compared with job growth of 5.3 percent for the nation as a whole.”

How bad is Romney’s record? During his tenure, Massachusetts ranked 47th out of 50 states in jobs growth.

So Mitt is doubly lying. He has a job -- managing his sizable assets as well as running for President. And he has no strong record for creating them. Or, per DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

“Mitt Romney’s comments today at an event with unemployed Floridians that he’s ‘also unemployed’ is inappropriate and insensitive to the millions of Americans looking for work. This comment shows that Mitt Romney – a man who wants for nothing and whose only occupation for more than four years has been to run for President - is incredibly out of touch with what’s going on in our country and around the dinner tables of those who are out of work.

“Being unemployed, Mr. Romney, is not a joke ... The fact is, the failed policies of the past, that he is advocating for, got us into the situation we’re in the first place and Americans want neither a repeat of those policies or the type of out-of-touch and failed leadership Mitt Romney represents.”

And he's somehow the serious GOP option?

Only if played by Steve Carrell.