Steve Jobs — to reference Apple a third time — was infamous for his ability to bend perception to his will. Whatever your conventional wisdom, whatever your reasoning, spend five minutes in a room with him, and he’d have you thinking otherwise.

It soon became known as his “reality distortion field”, and because Steve Jobs had World-Historical Instincts, he usually was right. Might have been the acid he dropped.

In preznidential politics, the closest we’ve seen to Jobs-quality reality-bending in living memory was Ronald Reagan. Had you watched his second debate with hapless Jimmy Carter, you would have immediately understood, as we did, that America wanted the charming charlatan to lead it, that Our Exceptional Nation preferred to live a lie rather than suffer in truth.

Reagan won by projecting confidence and optimism — never mind the reality — and successful candidates have followed his lead ever since. It’s not as easy as it looks. Reagan had decades of practice, shilling for one group or another. He knew how to work a room, and a crowd. Ronald Reagan was a natural.

Unlike Mitt Romney.

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In the year of national polling data that RealClearPolitics has on Jon Huntsman, he never broke past 5 percent — and only hit the nickel twice, in December. His entire candidacy can be defined as a margin of error. Yet we were supposed to take him seriously because Important People Told Us So.

Forget Trump. Forget Cain. Jon Huntsman was the Joke Candidate of the Year.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple on February 7, 1997. Five weeks later, Apple announced that it was laying off almost a third of its workers — 4,100 jobs. Almost fifteen years later, Apple had 60,000 employees, and Steve Jobs died with $7 billion to his name.

Nobody resented his wealth.

Years after he returned, Jobs would say that Apple was ninety days away from bankruptcy in 1997. Fellow computer magnate Michael Dell infamously said that October that if he was in charge, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Nobody resented Apple for killing jobs.

After all, that’s how capitalism works: Companies rise, companies fall. And some companies rise again from the ashes.

Contrast this with how vulture capitalism works:

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So we’re watching this Newt attack ad on Rachel last night, when suddenly we bark.

Understand, barking — HAH! — is something usually reserved for Jon & Stephen, not the evening news. We don’t just bark at anything. We have standards.

So, what let the dogs out? It wasn’t the highlight reel of Mitt’s Greatest Misses. That just elicited Mild Amusement, something akin to that smarmy smug grin Mitt adopts while he’s waiting for applause to fade. (Seriously, have you seen that look? Mitt is the Douchebag in Chief.)

No, it was right near the end, the title card that attempted to drive the point home:

Only Newt Gingrich can win the debates against Obama. Mitt Romney can’t.

HAH!

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Las Vegas political columnist Jon Ralston tweeted a nugget yesterday that we hadn’t noticed at WorldNetDaily:

Had no clue about Romney birthers! Woman calls to get me on Pulitzer-in-waiting story that George R. was Mexican citizen, Mitt ineligible.

As we know, the Romney Clan took a little detour south of the border a century ago to escape the tyranny of Singular Opposite Marriage, only to return when a pesky revolution interrupted their Big Love Bliss. Mitt’s dad — 1968 Preznidential candidate George Romney — happened to drop in Chihuahua in 1907, which might have raised qualification issues, had anybody cared.

But Anchor Baby Mitt? Detroit, 1947. Have we voted Michigan off the island because of all its Muslims?

Well, no. What the esteemed Mr. Ralston discovered was Advanced Birtherism.

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“Never get a job,” our local bowling-alley proprietor once told us, “where you have to work with the public.” His wisdom was offered a moment after dealing with an unruly customer, but we’ve remembered it over the years because not only does it apply to our own experience — in particular, answering the local paper’s complaint line during college — but also observation: Retail jobs pay shit.

Nobody wants to work retail. You only work retail when, for one reason or another, you have no other choice. One reason for going to college is to escape retail — to leave the Floor for the comfy confines of the Cubicle.

Which brings us to Mitt Romney.

His claim to have created “a hundred thousand jobs” — third-hand, through vulture-capital investments — is being (properly) criticized for only counting the Plus Column, and ignoring the Minuses. But nobody seems to be talking about the kinds of jobs Romney claims to have created.

Shit jobs.

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The other night, the impossible happened: We learned something new about Mitt Romney.

It was near the end of Iowa Night, and Lawrence O’Donnell, discussing Rick Santorum’s Italian-grandfather anecdote, observed that in politics, you don’t say things like that by chance. In Santorum’s case, you say that to draw implicit contrast with somebody else’s grandfather. Or, in this case, great-grandfather.

The story, briefly, goes like this: Mitt’s great-grandfather Miles Romney was an old-school Mormon. A Big Love Mormon. A Mormon who bequeaths you not just a great-grandfather and great-grandmother, but a lot of step-great-grandmothers, whatever you call them.

(And what do you call them? Love Grannies?)

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