When Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani finally announce officially, we plan to do a Tote Board column on the importance of announcement speeches. Suffice it to say for now that an announcement provides important clues as to how a candidate approaches the campaign and the office of the presidency – more even that a set of PowerPoint slides prepared by your friendly consultant and leaked to the local newspaper.
    Mitt Romney’s last month was no exception. In his speech in Dearborn, Michigan (in itself a revealing choice in that Romney hasn’t lived in Michigan for years), he spoke often and, at times, eloquently about how “innovation and transformation have been at the heart of America's success.” His premise and promise was that a Romney Administration would revive America economically and spiritually. In other words, if the U.S. were a company, he’d turn it around.
    All candidates and leaders return to their roots often, so it’s important to know what those roots are and why those particular roots are emphasized. Ronald Reagan, for example, was governor of the nation’s largest state but he was affected far more by his work for years for GE as a spokesman. Through this experience, Reagan, the former Democrat, became a staunch convert to the ideals and grievances of corporate America. Add that to his intimate knowledge of Hollywood – Reagan’s personal experiences were like having the best collection of old flicks that exist – and you can see why he was able to use the presidency so well to appeal to the country’s mythic sense of itself.
    Similarly, Jimmy Carter often grounded himself in his naval experience on a submarine under Hyman Rickover, even titling his autobiography from a question Rickover had once asked him, “Why not the best?”  Having that as his defining experience explains a lot why Carter ran his presidency in much the same way a nuclear engineer would, for better or worse.
    For Romney, it’s clear that his defining experience is not his faith – though the press will make a huge deal of it – nor his experience as governor of Massachusetts – a job in which he seemed to lose interest almost daily. Instead, it’s his extensive experience at Bain, a management consulting and later a private equity firm. According to Bain’s website:

    “We work with top management to beat their competitors and generate substantial, lasting financial impact.
    We look at a business as an integrated, cohesive whole. Bain helps companies find where to make their money, make more of it faster, and sustain its growth longer . . ..
    Where appropriate, we work with clients to make it happen - which may mean fundamentally changing the company.
    Our work is most successful when we work closely with clients who are dissatisfied with the status quo.”

    Taking Bain at its word – and it has a lengthy track record – this is not a bad experience for a potential president to have. There are a number of American industries that could do a lot worse than have Mitt Romney as their president.
    But it’s also easy to see where Romney may run into trouble as a candidate. Management consultants work behind the scenes; press scrutiny is not a regular part of the job, as it is for a politician. If they work collaboratively, they tend to work with upper management – not the masses. They tend to have a fairly simple measure of success – money – that may not translate into the more complicated political world. Changing your opinion often is a given; it’s praised as “flexibility.” In politics, in contrast, you can’t pick a position one day and then another the next and expect voters to believe or follow you.
    In other words, while it’s easy to see why the candidate from Bain might appeal to some Republicans (though interestingly, Romney would appear to be far better-suited to the more moderate GOP that welcomed his father and Nelson Rockefeller, not the present, more hard-line sunbelt version), it’s also easy to see why his set of skills might fail to prepare him adequately for a race for the presidency, much less the office itself.
    Mitt Romney for Secretary of Commerce. Maybe things will change, but at this point anything else looks like a stretch.

Published Mar 19 2007, 11:37 AM by Importer

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