My dad laid everybody off, you get it? Hahaha!

You don’t have to be a natural-born entertainer to win a major election, but you do have to be a fairly good liar. You have to know your audiences reasonably well, and tell them what they want to hear. That’s what makes Mitt Romney so special. Even when he tries to sound like an average Joe, he ends up reminding listeners that he’s the guy who puts the average Joes out of work.

From NYT:

Mitt Romney opened a “tele-town hall” with Wisconsin voters on Wednesday afternoon with what he described as a “humorous” story highlighting his connections to the state. But not everyone found the story, about his father closing a Michigan factory, quite so funny.

“You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors and they made Ramblers and Jeeps, and they had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wis., and another one in Milwaukee, Wis.,” Mr. Romney began. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Haha! What then?

“And I recall at one parade where he was going down the street, he was led by a band — they had a high school band that was leading each of the candidates — and his band did not know how to play the Michigan fight song, it only knew how to play the Wisconsin fight song. So every time they would start playing ‘On, Wisconsin! On, Wisconsin!’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin.”

Haha, that’s a good one! What’s funny is that Mitt always forgets he’s not at the private club with his private-equity pirate friends. He can’t resist indirectly reminding voters about his years at Bain Capital, where his specialty wasn’t moving production plants and jobs but rather destroying them.

Which reminds me, did you hear the one about Mitt saying he doesn’t approve of health insurance for people with pre-existing conditions?