Where is the Love?

(6 of 7)

But Romney is more than the sum of his inclinations, and flip-flops, on public-policy issues. He has a distinct ethos, which is indeed consistent. He is, at his core, a businessman, but of a particular sort: a turnaround artist, a consultant who takes control of a company, flushes out its inefficiencies and then sells it at a profit. And he is at his most convincing as a candidate when he talks about applying some of those principles to government. "Today, nine federal agencies run 47 different federal worker-retraining programs at a cost of $18 billion a year," he said in a recent speech. "I will send those workforce-training dollars back to the states, empowering them to retrain workers in ways that fit the needs of their respective economies."

Romney made a fortune finding efficiencies like that. He was a master at creative destruction, using the skills he'd learned as a management consultant to take sleepy companies and make them sleek. He was at the forefront of the business revolution of the 1980s, when debt replaced equity as the primary tool to raise capital. A great deal of good came of this, and Romney isn't shy about recounting his success stories--the creation of Staples, the office-supply chain, for example. But there was a significant downside to this revolution as well, and Ted Kennedy ran devastating television ads during the 1994 Senate campaign about the jobs lost in Romney restructurings. In sum, the form of capitalism that Romney practiced helped revive the U.S. corporate sector in the 1980s and made it more efficient in the short term but left it less likely to produce new products and technologies in the long term--with the exception of Wall Street, where phenomenal salaries lured the smartest young Americans to create fabulous new computerized gambling devices with, as former Fed chairman Paul Volcker has noted, no redeeming social value.

Romney has been particularly vague about the Wall Street crash and the causes of the Great Recession. His 150-page economic plan acknowledges that financial regulation is necessary, but he doesn't specify which kind. And this is where his refusal to be interviewed is most frustrating: No one has asked Romney to evaluate the downside of the capitalism he practiced. No one has asked him how he'd turn the fierce bias toward short-term profit into a more patient, productive, labor-intensive system. These are essential questions for 2012. They need to be answered slowly, carefully. Merely blaming the government is not enough (and ignoring them, as Obama has, isn't sufficient either).