If you haven’t heard Bill Maher’s monologue about why Steve Jobs should be running (and renaming) America — which aired on HBO last Friday, hit YouTube and the Huffington Post on Monday, and is posted below the fold — it’s worth watching, if only for the clever lines about the Tea Party and currency reform.

But if Maher thinks Jobs would have any interest in running the country, he’s missed the lesson of Apple’s (AAPL) success. The company has survived and prospered by staying tightly focused on what it does best. Except for maybe Apple TV, it rarely takes on more than it can chew.

Below: The video and a transcript of the Apple bits.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiZVrzz_zfE]

Transcript:

America needs to focus on getting Jobs — Steve Jobs. Because something tells me that Apple would have come up with a better idea for stopping an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico than putting a giant box on top of it.

In 2001, Apple reinvented the record player. In 2007, the phone. And this year, the computer. I say, for 2011, we let them take a crack at America. Our infrastructure, our business model, our institutions. Get rid of the stuff that’s not working, replace it with something that does. For example, goodbye U.S. Senate , hello Genius Bar! So good luck, Steve — ’cause you’ll need it!

Of course, I’m sure he’ll make us change the name.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]