A few months ago, Mitt Romney opined that maybe we ought to change the constitution so that "the president has to spend three years working in business before he becomes president of the United States. Then he or she would understand that the policies they are putting into place have to encourage small business to grow." Aside from being a profoundly stupid thing to say from the get-go, it looks like Mitt is now going to have to walk that one back, too. As Andrew Kaczynski notes at BuzzFeed, Mitt's vice presidential pick doesn't even come close to meeting Mitt's supposed business criteria. Paul Ryan's non-governmental business experience is more at the "high school summer jobs" level.

That's all right, though, because I think we all know Mitt didn't really mean any of it in the first place, and even if he did mean it it doesn't mean he still meant it when he woke up the next morning, and he certainly doesn't mean it now. But what this really means is we're about to be the beneficiaries of one of Mitt's trademark rationalizations for why the things he says don't apply when they come back to bite him in the ass. My predictions:

1. Simply denying that Paul Ryan in fact has precious little business experience, because reality is what Mitt Romney decides it is.

2. Giving Paul Ryan "honorary businessman" status because of his deep understanding of the works of Ayn Rand, which practically counts as business expertise. Thus we will find out that Mitt's proposed constitutional amendment was originally supposed to have "unless you've read a lot of Ayn Rand" appended onto it.

3. Refusing to take any and all questions related to Paul Ryan from now until November.

I'm leaning towards option two here, but given this is Romney we're talking about he could easily cycle through all three and back again. Consistency is not his strong suit.

