SO, DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN BARACK OBAMA RELEASED HIS TAXES FOR 2011?

Mitt Romney released his 2011 tax returns today, and, of course, it's a big story. Now, do you remember when President Obama released his returns for last year? I bet you don't. (It was on April 13.) There's an obvious reason why you don't: Obama has never made a great show of refusing to release multiple years of tax returns. (Quite the contrary -- here are tax returns for the Obamas and Bidens going back to 2000.)

Mitt Romney probably has something to hide in the tax returns from earlier years. But Romney also has a problem that makes him ill-suited for politics, a calling in which you're expected to tolerate a fairly high level of self-disclosure.

He was a boss.

You see, in business, if you're a boss, you pressure other people to do things. They don't pressure you. In a democracy, we voters hire the president (at least in theory) -- we're the board. Consciously or unconsciously, Romney doesn't think of us as the people deciding whether to hire him -- he thinks of us as employees.

Of course employees grumble. But the boss has no reason to pay attention to any employee complaints. Employees do what the boss asks them to do. It doesn't work the other way around.