Jeffrey Lord: Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle.
[Mr. Lord is creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV, a conservative, user-generated video site. A former Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania. ]
Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process.
In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: "His idea of the perfect deal is not when one side wins but when 'you find a new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go. That doesn't always happen.' "
Indeed.
Mr. Barnes says Mr. Romney's "approach to government is not ideological." A Romney adviser is quoted as saying of his candidate: "He's super-pragmatic. He's an eclectic conservative." And Mr. Romney himself says flatly that as president he would "insist on gathering data . . . and analyze the data looking for trends."
Uh-oh....
Let's take Mr. Romney back to two of the most important Republican presidencies in the history of America. Let's make him a ghostly observer as the presidents in question deal with "the data" being presented to them by their advisers.
Mr. Romney's first visit would be to the Lincoln White House in 1864. There was no Oval Office in 1864, so Mr. Romney finds Old Abe in his office upstairs on the second floor of the residence. Lincoln has just been handed a memo by his secretary of war, and the data look pretty grim
Lincoln is staring at a sheet filled with numbers. The numbers are of Union casualties in the 10 most casualty-filled battles of the Civil War thus far. The banality of ink-on-paper belies the horrific human impact behind the figures. Over 13,000 Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh, 16,000 at Second Manassas, 12,000 at Antietam and yet again at Stone River, 17,000 at Chancellorsville, 23,000 at Gettysburg. And so on in one battle after another stretching over the past three years.
So as our ghostly Mr. Romney studies these "data"--now what? The conservative fear, of course, is that the "superpragmatic" Mr. Romney who places such faith in the process of data and trends would say to Lincoln exactly what the Democratic nominee of 1864, a battlefield general of the war, was saying in his campaign against Lincoln. The war is a "failure," said George McClellan. Stop it--right now. The numbers, the kind of data so prized by a possibly future President Romney, are unmistakably ghastly. Union kids and Confederate kids--Americans all--are being slaughtered on a scale that dwarfs the imagination.
But what of principle here? What of the passion for the principle--and passion plays no small role in Lincoln's adherence to principle--that no man, woman or child should be a slave in America? What about the fundamental principle of human freedom? What about keeping the Union together? The startling thought occurs that Mr. Romney would be whispering to Lincoln that the data speak for themselves. Passion should yield to process. And that would be that, if Mr. Romney carried the day as Lincoln's adviser.
Move Mr. Romney back to the future, or at least the relatively recent past. This time his ghost is hovering over Ronald Reagan's shoulder. President Reagan is one happy guy. His tax and budget cuts have passed, and he signed them into law. The Reagan revolution has begun. But it's now 1985, and there's a problem. David Stockman, Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, a former congressman from Mr. Romney's native Michigan, the state where Romney's father was a star of the Republican liberal movement, is staring at reams of data. The results, as Mr. Stockman would write shortly after his angry departure from the Reagan White House, were--from Mr. Stockman's view--"frightening." The very idea that Reagan would stick with his tax cuts was a sign the president was in "dreamland." He was campaigning for re-election in 1984 on "false promises." Mr. Stockman--both in real time and in his bitter memoirs published in 1986--was nothing if not a fountain of data. And the data's conclusion, insisted Mr. Stockman, was that the Reagan revolution was a "failure." Reagan should abandon his passion for the principle of low taxes and cutting federal spending while restoring the military. Presumably, the Romney ghost sitting in the room with Reagan and Mr. Stockman would have agreed with . . . Mr. Stockman....
Read entire article at WSJ
Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process.
In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: "His idea of the perfect deal is not when one side wins but when 'you find a new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go. That doesn't always happen.' "
Indeed.
Mr. Barnes says Mr. Romney's "approach to government is not ideological." A Romney adviser is quoted as saying of his candidate: "He's super-pragmatic. He's an eclectic conservative." And Mr. Romney himself says flatly that as president he would "insist on gathering data . . . and analyze the data looking for trends."
Uh-oh....
Let's take Mr. Romney back to two of the most important Republican presidencies in the history of America. Let's make him a ghostly observer as the presidents in question deal with "the data" being presented to them by their advisers.
Mr. Romney's first visit would be to the Lincoln White House in 1864. There was no Oval Office in 1864, so Mr. Romney finds Old Abe in his office upstairs on the second floor of the residence. Lincoln has just been handed a memo by his secretary of war, and the data look pretty grim
Lincoln is staring at a sheet filled with numbers. The numbers are of Union casualties in the 10 most casualty-filled battles of the Civil War thus far. The banality of ink-on-paper belies the horrific human impact behind the figures. Over 13,000 Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh, 16,000 at Second Manassas, 12,000 at Antietam and yet again at Stone River, 17,000 at Chancellorsville, 23,000 at Gettysburg. And so on in one battle after another stretching over the past three years.
So as our ghostly Mr. Romney studies these "data"--now what? The conservative fear, of course, is that the "superpragmatic" Mr. Romney who places such faith in the process of data and trends would say to Lincoln exactly what the Democratic nominee of 1864, a battlefield general of the war, was saying in his campaign against Lincoln. The war is a "failure," said George McClellan. Stop it--right now. The numbers, the kind of data so prized by a possibly future President Romney, are unmistakably ghastly. Union kids and Confederate kids--Americans all--are being slaughtered on a scale that dwarfs the imagination.
But what of principle here? What of the passion for the principle--and passion plays no small role in Lincoln's adherence to principle--that no man, woman or child should be a slave in America? What about the fundamental principle of human freedom? What about keeping the Union together? The startling thought occurs that Mr. Romney would be whispering to Lincoln that the data speak for themselves. Passion should yield to process. And that would be that, if Mr. Romney carried the day as Lincoln's adviser.
Move Mr. Romney back to the future, or at least the relatively recent past. This time his ghost is hovering over Ronald Reagan's shoulder. President Reagan is one happy guy. His tax and budget cuts have passed, and he signed them into law. The Reagan revolution has begun. But it's now 1985, and there's a problem. David Stockman, Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget, a former congressman from Mr. Romney's native Michigan, the state where Romney's father was a star of the Republican liberal movement, is staring at reams of data. The results, as Mr. Stockman would write shortly after his angry departure from the Reagan White House, were--from Mr. Stockman's view--"frightening." The very idea that Reagan would stick with his tax cuts was a sign the president was in "dreamland." He was campaigning for re-election in 1984 on "false promises." Mr. Stockman--both in real time and in his bitter memoirs published in 1986--was nothing if not a fountain of data. And the data's conclusion, insisted Mr. Stockman, was that the Reagan revolution was a "failure." Reagan should abandon his passion for the principle of low taxes and cutting federal spending while restoring the military. Presumably, the Romney ghost sitting in the room with Reagan and Mr. Stockman would have agreed with . . . Mr. Stockman....