Poor McMitt is now being...um...dogged

FORGIVE ME, BUT I AM GETTING dangerously close to confessing my sympathy for Mitt Romney as a self-marked man. Whatever else he might be, he just doesn't seem cut out for a presidential campaign. In fact, he recalls the mythical Greek King Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods to forever roll a big stone up a hill only to see it roll back for an eternity.

Romney's critics wouldn't even give him the benefit of doubt at the decorous Westminster Kennel Club dog show, where protestors (even though he was nowhere near the place) picketed outside with placards complaining that he strapped his caged dog to the roof of his car when he took off for a family vacation. Considering the outcry, he might as well have strapped his wife in the cage and stuck his dog in the back seat with a full plate of prime strip steak.

The placards demonstrated that you don't mess around with the status of man's best friends in a civilized world. One said, "Mitt is Mean" and another, "I ride inside." The tee-shirt industry has already given dog-lovers (including me) a wide array of shirts to that profitable effect.

Meantime, back in Detroit, Romney astonishingly chose to write a column that appeared in the Detroit News on Tuesday that accused President Obama of "crony capitalism" for bailing out the auto industry. He said Obama's more evil motive was to satisfy the unions. Should somebody remind McMitt, who once argued that corporations are people, that unions are people, too?

But now that tens of thousands of workers again have jobs should one of his advisors have suggested that now was not the time for returning to his screed that it would be better to let the auto companies sink into bankruptcy as the way to save them?. (The NY Times headline over his column in 2008 was "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt." Not well done, Sir. )

Small wonder that despite his avowed love affair with his Michigan roots, he is now trailing Santorum in the state by the length of a GM assembly line.

Maybe we can learn something from Ohio History: When Jim Rhodes decided to run for a third term after an imposed hiatus, his ad advisors told me that they decided he would have a tougher time getting elected if he were on the loose. So...

They worked on the theory that it would be better if "we put his ads on TV and hid the candidate in the basement," Without seeing very much of him during the campaign , the voters reelected him. Think they might find a spot for McMitt in the basement?