Homo sapiens seem destined to suffer one of the more common fates of common folk after the end of totalitarian rule — war, chaos and brutal, if less total, exploitation at the hands of tyrants, oligarchs, warlords and military juntas.

Into this dire situation steps Jonnie, who proves that his genius isn’t just for armed insurrection but for diplomacy and great power politics as well. He outwits his enemies at the conference table, finds a way to settle the 60 trillion galactic credit debt that Earth discovers it owes to the Galactic Bank and threatens the assembled dignitaries and thugs into signing a treaty forbidding war forever. Then to top it all off, he draws on his recently acquired knowledge of ancient Earth economic theory to persuade them that their interests would be best served not by reaping wealth through war, as they’ve been accustomed to doing, but by introducing free market capitalism, and commercial banking, to the universes.

“There are other ways of handling economies,” Jonnie explains. “You could phase every war industry you have over to what is called ‘consumer production.’ You make things for the people. The people are employed. They make things for one another. Your people are your best market for your industries. … Your people, now starving and rioting, can become gainfully employed in peace industries. They can have things for themselves. Such things as better houses and furniture, better clothes, better food.”

It does not require an esoteric reading of Hubbard’s text, in other words, to identify conservative notions of the kind Romney seems to hold. It’s full of explicit commentary about the stupidity of taxes and the dangers of an overly intrusive state. The Earth government that Jonnie helps set up after the dust settles is a kind of paternalistic libertarian utopia, in which no one pays any taxes except what they volunteer as donations; the rest of the expenses are quietly covered from Jonnie’s personal account. There’s even an offhand insult of “some nut named Keynes,” whose bad theories Jonnie encounters while cramming for his meeting with the Galactic Bank.

Earth’s foreign policy, once the Psychlos are gone, is like a neoconservative fantasy of what the Forces of Freedom and Light could do if we had a Death Star and were willing to use it. Jonnie coerces the signatures on his pan-universal peace treaty by showing his rivals a holographic recording of the nuking and subsequent implosion of the Psychlo planet. He then calmly explains to them that he’ll do the same to their planets if they don’t comply. They sign, and freedom rolls forth.

Even for 1982, when the novel was published, it reads a bit retrograde in its earnest celebration of white guys kicking ass. There are almost no women, and the few who show up are virginally pure. There’s a sentimental ethnotyping of the various surviving human populations (Chinese people are good at cooking and understanding the rules of courtly etiquette; Scottish men all sound like Montgomery Scott and dress like highlanders). And the white guys are total Übermenschen. Jonnie himself was “a muscular six feet shining with the bronzed health of his 20 years,” with “corn yellow hair and beard,” and “ice-blue eyes.” It was as if Hubbard hadn’t gotten the memo that it wasn’t the 1940s anymore, when he and his buddy Robert Heinlein had helped work out the formula for this kind of high adolescent science fictional adventure tale.

But for all that, my guess — and I can only guess at this — is that it misses the point to assume that Romney likes the book for these reasons. I suspect he’s drawn to it more for the reasons I was.

I first read the novel when I was 12 or 13. I didn’t quote the above passages from memory, but you’ll have to trust me when I say that I knew exactly where to find them in the text when I booted it up on my iPad. “Battlefield Earth” is a ridiculous book, every bit the gargantuan exercise in nerd-boy wish fulfillment you’d expect from someone like Hubbard, who was such a nerd-boy bent on wish fulfillment that he invented a religion to fulfill his dreams of mastery and immortality.

But “Battlefield Earth” is also an incredibly exciting book, pulp of the pulpiest order. It’s the kind of adventure story that exerts a particularly strong pull, I’d wager, on boys of a certain age with a certain need to escape into, or project themselves into, heroic tales of conquest, mastery and moral clarity.

For me it was, I half-realized as a teenager and fully realize now, consolation. It was comfort food, compensation for my feelings of insecurity, inadequacy, anxiety.

I don’t think I read the whole, 1,000-plus-page thing through more than twice, but I read my favorite set pieces dozens of times. I read it late at night, when I should have been getting sleep for school. I read it, at times almost hungrily, when I was home on vacation from college. I read it to feel better, to feel nothing, to escape.

That’s not to say that there was nothing political about my attraction to the book, and to the hundreds of other such books I read. But the politics of it went deeper, into the muck of those psychological processes by which we process, deny or sublimate the data of the world, our fears, our fantasies. I wanted to save the world. I wanted to be strong. I wanted to vanquish enemies. I wanted good and evil to be clear. I wanted to run away. I wanted to escape the anxieties of my family, of school, of sexual desires that I had no real means of satisfying. A lot of the time I just wanted to disappear into the time-displacing comfort of a well-plotted adventure.

At a minimum Mitt Romney was 36 or 37 when he first read the book. I’m now 36, and though I haven’t read “Battlefield Earth” in a while, I’m not clean. I still read science fiction and fantasy, and though I’m wiser and more sophisticated than I was as an adolescent, when they exerted their strongest pull, that hasn’t meant discarding those parts of me that were formed by the books.

It hasn’t meant rejecting the books. It’s meant reckoning with the influence they’ve had on me, and with those parts of me that sought them out. It’s not wrong to want to save the world, be a hero, fight for the cause of justice, live a purposeful life. But it’s unserious to believe that these things are easy, that they can be achieved without sacrifice or compromise, that being heroic in one’s own life is going to look anything like what it looks like for Jonnie Goodboy Tyler. And it can be horribly toxic to continue as an adult to view the world through an unreconstructed Hubbardian lens. Women, I’ve learned, actually do exist. Death Star foreign policy is problematic in a number of ways. It’s not bogus left-wing literary theory to notice that aliens, in books like “Battlefield Earth,” are often proxies for the kinds of dark-skinned humans that we palefaces have historically had a hard time seeing as human. Problems like war, poverty, oppression and exploitation don’t just melt away when you set loose patriotic, super-resourceful, can-do capitalist-engineer-ninjas to do their thing.

The key question about Romney and “Battlefield Earth” — or Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragon Flight,” or Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” two other old favorites of mine that Romney’s mentioned liking — isn’t: What does it mean that he likes the book so much? I like the book. I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that Barack Obama likes the book, or Karl Rove, or David Petraeus (all of whom have at least a glint of the nerd-boy about them). The question is what has Romney done with it? How has he reckoned with it?

What was going through his mind, back in the 1980s, when he came home at night after a long day of leveraged buyouts, when the kids were all in bed and he and his wife, Ann, lay side by side in their bed, she with her “Anna Karenina” and he with his “Battlefield Earth”? Did he see himself as heroic like Jonnie Goodboy Tyler? Was he saving companies from the Forces of Bad Management and Government Intrusion? Was he reading, instead, as an escape from the moral compromises of the work he was doing at Bain Consulting, which, however you slice it macroeconomically, didn’t meet the standards of moral purity that would have satisfied Jonnie Goodboy Tyler?

What does he think about the politics (explicit and implicit) of “Battlefield Earth” now that he’s running for president, and may soon end up in a position where he has to decide how to handle the Psychlos at home and abroad?

It seems unlikely that Romney’s going to engage these questions, and in the absence of such answers it’s inappropriate to go too far in analyzing him by way of the book. But it’s worth saying this: “Battlefield Earth” is in most respects a silly story, but for a lot of us it’s just such silly stories that have made us who we are. If Romney is elected president, he will wield enormous power over the people of Earth, and I have a feeling that somewhere in that psyche of his there’s the voice of Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, and L. Ron Hubbard, saying something about how to be righteous in the world. I hope for our sake, and for the sake of galactic peace and prosperity, that Romney has enough wisdom to take from those voices what’s good in them, and to keep the rest in proper perspective.

“It’s one of the things that I think should continue to be the case,” Blunt said of the “dependent coverage” provision, explaining that “it’s a way to get a significant number of the uninsured into an insurance group without much cost,” because young people are generally healthy.

Blunt noted that he even introduced a bill when he was in the House that would do exactly what the provision of the Affordable Care Act does now, saying, “I was for it then, and I’d be for it now.” “You’re breaking some news,” host McGraw Milhaven quipped.

While Blunt said he still favors repealing most of the health law, he would want to preserve a few sections, including the dependent coverage provision and the creation of high-risk pools for patients with preexisting conditions.

Romney has repeatedly vowed to fully repeal the Affordable Care Act, though he hasn’t spoken out specifically on the dependent coverage provision and he enacted a similar provision as governor. The provision is hugely popular, even though the overall law is not. And while Republican leaders supported the extension of coverage to 26-year-olds as recently as 2009, when it was included in the GOP’s healthcare alternative proposal, the GOP’s message today is that they’re for a complete repeal of the law, including the minimum coverage provision.

This got Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., in trouble after it was revealed that he takes advantage of Obamacare to make sure his daughter has insurance.

Pressed again by Halperin, “But you welcome scrutiny of your business record, is that right?” Romney replied, “The fact is that I spent 25 years in the private sector. And that obviously teaches you something that you don’t learn if you haven’t spent any time in the private sector.”

It’d be impossible for Romney to avoid completely talking about Bain, considering how central it is to his narrative about his ability to fix the economy, but some people on both sides of the aisle have called Obama’s Bain attacks unfair.

But even some of Romney’s own surrogates — perhaps veering a bit off message — have sanctioned putting Bain in play. Former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, who was one of Romney’s key allies in the first-in-the-nation primary, told reporters yesterday, “I think the Bain record as a whole is fair game, and what you have to do is do an honest evaluation.” Former GOP presidential candidate turned Romney-backer Newt Gingrich agreed in an interview on CNN this week, though he cautioned Democrats that his own experience attacking Romney over Bain didn’t work out too well.

“This president receives the lion’s share of funding from organized labor, and the teachers’ unions represent a massive source of funding for the Democratic Party,” Romney said. “The challenge with that is when it comes to actual reform to make schools better for our kids, they talk a good game, but they don’t do it.”

He continued, “If I’m president of the United States, instead of just giving lip service to improving our schools, I will actually put the kids first and the union behind in giving our kids better teachers, better options and better choices for a better future.”

The message is consistent for the Romney campaign, which regularly heaps criticism on the Democratic president’s policies but offers only a vague road map for what Romney would do.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said Wednesday that Romney’s shift to education was welcome after a long campaign season in which he said the GOP rarely mentioned the issue.

“Education never came up in the Republican primary in any of the debates, or if it did, it came up almost never,” Carney said.

Carney said Obama’s education initiatives have received broad bipartisan support and that the president “looks forward to defending that record.”

Romney’s shift carries some risk. His regular criticism of labor unions, in particular, threatens to alienate voters in Rust Belt states like Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where a close election may be decided.

Before the speech, Romney announced Tuesday a team of education policy advisers that includes former Education Secretary Rod Paige and other officials from President George W. Bush’s administration. Paige is among several prominent opponents of teachers’ unions on the panel. As education secretary in 2004, he labeled the National Education Association a “terrorist organization.”

Romney’s positions on education have evolved over time. He once supported abolishing the Education Department but reversed that position as a presidential candidate in 2007. At the time, he said he came to see the value of the federal government in “holding down the interests of the teachers’ unions” and putting kids and parents first.

Romney also changed his position on the Bush-era education overhaul known as “No Child Left Behind.” He said he supported the law as a candidate in 2007, but he has since generally come out against the policy many conservatives see as an expansion of the federal government.

Romney continues to support the federal accountability standards in the law, however. He also has said the student testing, charter-school incentives and teacher evaluation standards in Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition “make sense,” although the federal government should have less control over education. The campaign in recent days has emphasized his support for charter schools while governor of Massachusetts, a theme likely to play out in Wednesday’s address.

The speech represents Romney’s first public event in four days. Working to close Obama’s cash advantage, he’s coming off a three-day fundraising swing in the New York area that his chief finance aide said had netted $15 million. A single finance event in Manhattan on Tuesday evening generated $5 million.

Still, the campaign is eager to drive a positive message for voters now tuning in to the contest.

The education speech follows a relatively quiet phase for Romney, who has been focused on fundraising but usually delivers one major address a week. Most of his recent speeches, however, have been about the economic themes that so far have defined his campaign.

Earlier polls generally showed the former Massachusetts governor holding a slight lead over Obama on economic issues and Obama slightly ahead overall.

But the tightening follows an aggressive attack on Romney’s business credentials by the Obama campaign, including ads painting him as a job-destroying corporate raider at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he co-founded.

Romney called the attacks “character assassination.” But Obama defended the tactic on Monday as legitimate and suggested Romney’s background was a poor qualification for the White House since being president involves more than “maximizing profits.”

Still, some prominent Democratic supporters have expressed discomfort with the attacks, including former Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr., former Obama economic adviser Steve Rattner and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Booker said he found attack ads from both sides “nauseating.” However, he later said Romney’s business record was fair game.

With U.S. unemployment still hovering above 8 percent and economic uncertainty widespread, both candidates have stepped up their emphasis on jobs and the economy.

Romney was fund raising in New York with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and had no public appearances. Obama was at the White House also with no public appearances scheduled.

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Associated Press News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report.

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Follow Tom Raum on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/tomraum. For more AP political coverage, look for the 2012 Presidential Race in AP Mobile’s Big Stories section. Also follow https://twitter.com/APCampaign and AP journalists covering the campaign: https://twitter.com/AP/ap-campaign-2012.

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