How Romney would govern: as a manager listening to leftist experts
LA to James N.:
Why in your mind is Romney so much worse than the others that you wouldn’t vote for Romney against Obama, even though, as you say, a second Obama term means national ruin?
James N. replies:
I do not share the contempt that many trucons have for Romney. I do not care that he is an LDS follower (although, at times, I worry that I should).
He is a nice man, a good husband and father. One of his homes is in my little town, we even run into him from time to time. Very nice guy.
He is also a manager. That’s what he does. His method, which he perfected at Bain Capital, was to assemble the experts in a room, and using a modified Delphi technique, achieve expert consensus and an action plan.
The problem with this is that, in public policy as opposed to industry, the “experts” have a strong collectivist/leftist bias. Romneycare happened because no one at the Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard School of Public Health, or the Public Policy section at Partners Healthcare thought there was anything wrong with it.
As far as I can tell, Romney thinks politics is stupid (he has a point…). He regards politics as a necessary evil to arrive at a point where authority can be exercised. But exercised to what end?
Romney as executive, as Governor of Massachusetts, was like Churchill’s pudding which lacked a theme. His vision of executive authority is making problem lists, getting the really smart guys in a room, and arriving at consensus.
As with “global warming,” the consensus for most of our public policy issues is drastically, disastrously wrong. Romney in the White House, unless he has conservative convictions which have so far not been in evidence, will be a conveyor belt for every bad idea that the public policy fraternity has hatched in the last 50 years.
I did not say I would not vote for him. I said I would vote for any of them, POSSIBLY excepting Romney.
My reasons are above.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 08, 2011 07:49 PM | Send