For the past couple of weeks the President’s re-election campaign has been hammering on his “presumptive” Republican challenger saying that Romney outsourced jobs when at Bain Capital.
As most people in business know, outsourcing is not all that uncommon. How many companies use payroll services rather than in-house accounting personnel to prepare weekly paychecks? How many companies buy or lease eighteen-wheelers and hire drivers of their own rather than contract with freight haulers? How many companies do you think actually manufacture every single part of every single thing that they make? Do you really think that they produce the cardboard for the boxes that are used for shipping their products?
But our President keeps trying to convince the American electorate that somehow outsourcing is akin to child molestation in the pantheon of evils, and that Mitt Romney is the high priest of outsourcing.
The President even has a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness that keeps him up to date on what’s new and cutting edge in ideas for improving the economy. Does anyone think that such a council, which coincidentally is headed by the Chief Executive Officer of General Electric Company, Jeffrey Immelt, suggested that outsourcing is evil? Anyone at all?
That being said, what possible reason could the Obama team, or Obama himself, have for picking outsourcing as a campaign issue? There may actually be a company that does absolutely everything in-house. I’ve never seen or heard of such a firm, but for the sake of argument I’ll stipulate that it might exist. If it does exist, why hasn’t the President held it up as a poster child for his view of economic genius?
So the President knows better than to claim that outsourcing is inefficient. In that case, he is simply lying. Flat out lying. Do you think we ought to re-elect him so we can get another four years of outright lies? Do you?
Perhaps the President believes that there really are lots of companies in America that do everything and never, never, ever subcontract to people who might be more efficient at any part of their operation. If that is the case, the President is delusional, and don’t we all want a delusional person leading our government? Of course we do. NOT!
But there is a chance that the President is simply clueless. Never actually having had a real job in the private sector there is a good chance that he has no idea how a real organization is structured, or how it works. Great! Just absolutely great! A man with at most a faint whiff of information about how a large entity operates is now head of one of the largest entities on the planet, and is totally clueless. Yeah, right, let’s re-elect this guy.
