A job for Mitt

Another friend of mine told me he regrets Romney losing because he was looking forward to (I’m paraphrasing) ”Bainiacs running around the Department of Labor.” … Which leads to a thought: Why doesn’t Obama put Romney to work making the federal government more efficient? The Romney Commission! Let Mitt’s Bainiacs scour the halls of government–’You don’t really need that $80,000-a-year deputy speechwriter, do you?’–and then make proposals for where to cut, where to reorganize, how to get rid of the fat that’s marbled in.

Romney’s good at this sort of thing. There’s precedent for such a commission. It would make Obama look magnanimous and (what voters are said to want) bipartisan. It would be bipartisan. And if it actually did result in efficiencies would help validate the government that remains. (Meanwhile, it would defuse some of the well-justified reflexive antigovernment feeling on the center and right.) Even E.J. Dionne would approve. …