As Firing-gate has heated up, I’ve been thinking—hmmm…maybe Romney's remark that he "likes" firing people was a stoke of genius.
Maybe instead of being a foot-in-mouth comment, as this piece from the Daily Beast predictably describes it, Romney was actually engaging in a brilliant Machiavellian plot to rally to his banner everybody who has ever had to deal with a surly government worker. Now, that's what I call a big voting block.
Now, to be fair, Mitt Romney didn’t actually say he likes firing people—he only said that he likes to have the right to fire people who turn in a subpar performance. But he did give the distinct impression that he has the stomach to fire people.
Ann Coulter, whose backing has given Romney some much-needed conservative creds, had the same thought I had about firing public workers, though Coulter expressed it more hilariously in a column headlined “Who Wouldn’t Enjoy Firing These People?”
Coulter notes that in particular government health administrators will be fireproof unless they are caught breaking the law under the rules of Obamacare. Coulter writes:
Romney's statement about being able to fire people was an arrow directed straight to the heart of Obamacare. (By the way, arrows to the heart are not covered by Obamacare.)
Ann raises the issue I brought up yesterday about how hard it is to fire bad public school teachers. She also recounts the chilling saga of the nurse caught on tape robbing an elderly patient. The robber nurse was fired but later a court overturned the firing and awarded her back pay for the time she missed.
She also talks about porn-surfing Securities and Exchange Commission employees, people making between $100,000 and $200,000 a year, who were not fired.
A Romney surrogate in New Hampshire made a more sober case for firing, rightly linking the ability to fire to accountability.