过去我从没想到有一天我会为杰克•韦尔奇感到可惜，但现在就是这样。周三他在《华尔街日报》（Wall Street Journal）上刊登了一篇专栏文章《为什么我说这份就业报告古怪》，这篇文章的字里行间给我的感觉也是怪怪的。

    虽然以前我很少写到杰克•韦尔奇，哪怕是他担任通用电气（General Electric）CEO、声名赫赫之时，但我一直关注并赞赏他高超的应对媒体之道。甚至在我少有的一次写到他时，他都写来信表达了他的意见。

    1999年在韦尔奇宣布他将于2001年退休时，我在《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)上写了一篇专栏文章称，在看到继任者的表现前，还不能对韦尔奇在通用电气的表现盖棺定论。这篇有违当时主流观点的文章一度让我的一些老板感到紧张。文章发表后不久，我家的传真机里就吐出了一封我万万没有料到的来信：来自韦尔奇的一封构思精巧的手写信函告诉我，我是对的。

    相比此前的风波（细节不再赘述），韦尔奇如此大度智慧的表态让我折服。我不再称他为“中子弹杰克”(这个外号源于他大刀阔斧的裁员)，差不多变成了他的粉丝。

    但如今的韦尔奇在这方面的表现大失水准。他不再游刃有余，不再从容大度，似乎成了一个没有幽默感、一点就着的家伙。

    看看韦尔奇的《华尔街日报》专栏，这个专栏可是占据了传媒界最受人觊觎的位置之一。在这篇文章中，他犯了和上周同样的错误，上周的错误导致了他在《财富》杂志（Fortune）和汤森路透(Thomson Reuters)的专栏合约终结。

    韦尔奇的文章在给不出一点证据的情况下，声称美国劳工统计局（Bureau of Labor Statistics，简称BLS）为了帮助奥巴马（Obama）的连任竞选，捏造了上周的失业数据。他在上周五的推特上也是这么说，引发了民众和政治阶层的一片哗然。

    在《华尔街日报》上，韦尔奇详详尽尽地谈到了BLS统计方法的种种缺陷。哦，好吧。这些缺陷以及他可能还提到过的其他缺陷，并不是什么秘密。正因为此，很多人，包括我在内，对BLS某一个月份的数据并不是很当真。BLS的数据有时就是靠不住。(请参见我的同事Steve Gandel的文章。)

    看这些数据看了这些年，我能说的最多也就是这些数据靠不住，对共和党和民主党都一样。但当BLS数据对奥巴马不利时，我也没有听到主流民主党人抱怨统计数据被捏造。那时我也没听到韦尔奇对此有什么不满。

    如果是巅峰时期的韦尔奇，时下或许会写一篇引人思考或发笑的专栏文章，让自己摆脱这样的窘境。但现在的韦尔奇所做的只是在《华尔街日报》专栏文章中继续发牢骚，在这个泥潭里越陷越深。这可有失身份。

    韦尔奇和我一样，年岁已长。我今年67岁，他比我还大10岁。他在美国企业界有过非常辉煌的时期，过去十年在专栏写作领域也颇多建树。可惜的是他不懂激流勇退。

    译者：早稻米

    I never thought I would feel sorry for Jack Welch, but now, I do. His op-ed piece in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal, "I Was Right About That Strange Jobs Report," strikes me as, well, strange.

    Even though I rarely wrote about Welch when he was becoming a household name as chief executive of General Electric (GE), I watched -- and admired -- the way he handled himself with the media. He even managed to get the last word on one of the rare occasions I wrote about him.

    In 1999, after Welch announced that he'd retire in 2001, I wrote a Newsweek column saying we couldn't close the books on Welch's tenure at GE until after we'd seen how his successor performed -- a contrarian piece that made some of my bosses nervous. Shortly after the piece ran, my home fax machine spit out the last thing I expected to see: a brilliantly crafted, handwritten note from Welch telling me I was right.

    That display of grace and wit, on top of a previous episode that's too inside-baseball to go into, turned me from someone who called him "Neutron Jack" (for all the U.S. jobs he vaporized) into an almost-fan.

    But now Welch has lost his game. He's not deft, he's not graceful, he seems to have turned into a humorless guy with a chip on his shoulder.

    Let's look at Welch's Journal column, which occupies some of the most highly coveted space in the media world. In it, he makes the same mistake he made last week, one that led to the end of his stint as a columnist at Fortune and at our competitor, Thomson Reuters.

    Welch's op-ed asserts, without a shred of evidence, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics cooked last week's unemployment numbers in order to help President Obama's reelection campaign. That's the same thing he said in his Friday tweets that touched off the uproar among the chattering and political classes.

    In the Journal, Welch goes on at almost wonkish length about the flaws in the BLS methodology. Well, duh. Those flaws, and others that he could have mentioned, are no secret. They're one reason that many people, including me, put little stock in the numbers the bureau reports in a given month. The BLS numbers are sometimes just hinky, to use the technical term. (See my colleague Steve Gandel's take.)

    From having watched these numbers for years, as best I can tell, they're hinky for Republicans and Democrats alike. But when the BLS numbers weren't going Obama's way, I didn't hear mainstream Democrats complaining that the books were being cooked. For that matter, I didn't hear Welch complaining then, either.

    In his prime, Welch would have extricated himself from this mess by writing a column that made people think, and maybe smile. But all Welch did in his Journal column is whine, and dig himself deeper into the hole. It's beneath his dignity.

    Welch, who's a fellow senior citizen of mine -- I'm 67, he's a decade older -- has had a great run, both in corporate America and, for the past decade, in the world of commentary and opinion. It's a shame that he didn't quit while he was still totally ahead.