Romney's VP Should Be FedEx's Fred Smith

Obama never signed the front of a paycheck. Heck, he never held a legitimate for-profit job. You have to look hard and long to find someone less suitable in our society to hold public office -- let alone the U.S. presidency -- than Barack Obama. Sad, but objectively true.

Narrowing the Field

So what does this tell us about Romney's VP selection? Two things:

1. Romney can't pick someone very significantly younger than himself. The reason many people will vote for Romney is that he is the mature, experienced adult in the room.

For this reason, just for starters, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan will most likely not become VP. In both cases, they are barely above 40 years old. They would be OK if the sitting president weren't Obama, and the challenger weren't Romney. But this time, they don't fit Romney's basic requirements.

2. Romney should not pick a lifetime politician, Washington DC-centric or not, as VP. This means no state governor and no congressperson, unless that person also has solid private industry experience. Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio largely or completely fail this criterion as well.

Romney's charm as a candidate is that he has never held a job in Washington, DC and that only a small part of his overall experience is as a sitting politician. The bulk of his resume is populated by his masterful performance at Bain, where he made tons of money financing companies such as Staples, Sports Authority and Domino's Pizza.

The only logical conclusion here, in my opinion, is that Romney needs to double down on what sets him apart. Romney needs to have a senior and extremely successful private sector CEO as VP.

The Road Ahead

The major challenge for the next president will be twofold:

1. Cut government spending. This involves firing people. How many out of the government's millions of bureaucrats have Obama fired? Exactly. How many people had Obama fired before becoming president? Exactly.

Back in 1789, President George Washington ran the entire federal government on approximately the same number of 13 bureaucrats that constituted the employee rolls at Instagram when it was sold to Facebook for $1 billion two weeks ago. We are probably not going back to having 13 people in the Federal civilian workforce again anytime soon, but we probably need to cut at least one million paper-shufflers pronto. Over a few years, we can and should cut 99% of Federal bureaucrats, but in the near term we have to cut at least half of them just to prevent a Greece-style bankruptcy.