Corporations are people, my friend. Teachers and firefighters, not so much

A couple of months ago, it looked like a race between President Obama and Mitt Romney might be a laugher, but now it looks like it could be a gaffer -- which ever candidate says the biggest, dumbest thing closest to the election will lose. Of course, not unlike Donald Rumsfeld's famous explanation of the different brands of "knowns," not all gaffes are created equal. One kind of gaffe can be when a candidate uses dumb and politically harmful language trying to explain something that sort of makes sense, while another kind of gaffe is saying what you really believe...when what you really believe is pretty horrible.

On Friday, Obama tried to explain that any recovery is being held back more by cutbacks at the state (hello, Tom Corbett) and local level than by the private sector, which has steadily gained jobs. But the private job gains haven't been nearly enough, which is why it was befuddling that Obama called it "fine." What's even less "fine" is Mitt Romney's belief that keeping the teacher in your kid's classroom or the cop who patrols your street on the job is what's destroying America. In Mitt Romney's America, corporations are people, my friend, but apparently schoolteachers, cops and firefighters are 3/5 of a person. From coast to coast, Republican governors like Corbett are showing up to slash thousands of actual, paying jobs and then asking, "Where are the jobs?"

It didn't have to be this way. As Paul Krugman noted the other day, one key reason that things turned out differently for Ronald Reagan after Obama after both inherited dismal economies is that government jobs grew (yes, grew!) under the Gipper, both in the state and local sector and in defense. As Reagan once tried to say, facts are stubborn things.