Romney: “It kills me not to be there, doing what needs to be done.”

Mitt Romney gave Fox News Sunday what they describe as an “unflinching review of his unsuccessful campaign,” in which he criticized President Obama’s mishandling of sequestration, and expressed a heartfelt desire to be the one handling those tough decisions right now:

It kills me not to be there, not to be in the White House doing what needs to be done… The President is out campaigning to the American people, doing rallies around the country, flying around the country and berating Republicans and blaming and pointing.  That causes the Republicans to retrench and to put up a wall and to fight back.

Decisions like sequestration (and the vastly larger spending cuts and entitlement reforms that must lie beyond it, if the American system of government is to survive) are the sort of thing Romney specialized in.  America had a chance to hire one of the best turnaround managers in the business world.  Instead, they listened to a bottom-feeding campaign that accused a good man of tax evasion and murder, while swallowing an astonishing pile of lies from Obama about his alleged fiscal responsibility.  It’s almost delirious to revisit the garbage Obama was selling in his campaign appearances and presidential debates now.  Remember $3 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases?

Much of the blame lies with Romney and his campaign team, for failing to deal effectively with Obama’s preposterous re-election campaign.  And blame also lies with American voters for falling for it.  Sometimes we are counseled to speak carefully to the Low Information Voter, lest we alienate them.  But I don’t think we’re doing them any favors by coddling stupidity.  And we sure as hell can’t count on the “mainstream” media to shake them awake.  

If Romney had won the White House and was currently running the exact same sort of “community organizer” agitation campaign to push his agenda through – jetting around the country at fabulous expense to tell blatant lies about sequestration while spending less than ten minutes actually talking with congressional leaders – the media would be crucifying him right now, and the word they’d use for nine-inch nails would be “divisive.”  The media, not the defeated 2012 candidate, would be pointing out that the President’s unproductive finger-pointing perpetual-campaign tactics were backing his political opponents into a corner, and leaving them no choice but to fight.  And yet, it would seem “divisive” is a word they cannot begin to make themselves apply to Barack Obama.  That’s un-possible for him, apparently.

Even given the election outcome… why couldn’t Mitt Romney be the one making these fiscal decisions?  Obama has openly stated that he can’t be trusted to handle the job; his refusal to accept authority for managing the sequestration cuts, along with the rest of his bizarre Friday press conference, was the kind of verbiage a better man would have written into his letter of resignation, back in a more responsible era.  But since the world doesn’t work that way anymore, why doesn’t Obama appoint Romney “Sequester Czar” and see if he can’t find a way to implement those hellish $44 billion in spending cuts without turning America into a wasteland?  The community organizer admits he can’t handle the job.  Let’s give the efficiency expert a chance.