Barack Obama Will Win the Presidential Election

This is how I know. (Sorry, Mitt Romney, it ain't gonna happen for you.)

I now know for certain there’ll be a second President Obama term. I knew it the moment Jon Stewart described Romney as looking like the guy who fired your dad.

The imagery was unerring. And a knee slapper to boot.

It’s so easy to picture Romney firing your dad. He’d do it by the book too. He’d have Joanie, his longtime loyal assistant who juggles all his lunch dates at the club and who he rewards every Christmas with a re-gift from a family friend, buzz dad’s cubicle. He’d of course be sure to have dad’s name on an index card along with a few brief bullet points on his desk in front of him. He’d have an associate in his office with him.

Soon as dad sat down, he’d hit him real quick with the carefully parsed dismissal points, none of them personal of course. He’d wish him luck and thank him for his 22 years of service.

Then he’d stand up. “Contact HR about COBRA,” he’d say, feigning assurance. “That should work out for you.”

It would all happen so fast, so bloodlessly, that before leaving dad would instinctively reach out and shake the outstretched mitt thrust in front of him.

Later, when trying to tell mom what happened, dad would remember almost nothing about the encounter except the handshake. He wouldn’t even remember driving home.

You could chalk all this up to hyperbolic fantasy, to Romney-as-bloodless-prick Democratic spin, a parsed reality geared to appeal to the financially strapped middle class voter.

You could, except that Romney keeps telling us himself how little he knows about the pain of joblessness.

“There were a couple of times I wondered whether I was going to get a pink slip,” Romney cracked at a rally in New Hampshire, hoping to show us that he too can relate to hard times.

The media whooped and quickly badgered Romney’s aides for an example, please, of a time when their candidate worried about losing a job. No examples were forthcoming, but that’s not really the point, is it?

What would Romney do if he had been pink slipped?

Here’s what he wouldn’t have to do: He wouldn’t have to decline all invitations to have dinner at a restaurant with friends, or disconnect the cable, or keep the heat as low as possible, or bargain for time with the landlord and the bank, or start selling stuff on Craig’s List, which is what losing a job means to a whole lot of people. And worse.

“I like being able to fire people,” Romney said earlier this week, doubling down on his insensitivity quotient.

Romney was talking about being able to fire his insurance company but that almost didn’t matter. The rhetorical blind spot exposed what he couldn’t feel: the anguish of the job-searching middle class.

“Mitt was talking about the individual citizen’s right to fire their insurance company,” quipped Stephen Colbert. “Which of course would hurt those companies’ profits, making them vulnerable to takeover, then Mitt could enjoy firing those people.”

Despite all this, it’s likely Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee.

Which means four more years for President Obama.

Don’t believe me? Ask Dad who he’s voting for.