Mitt Romney comes to the American people with business
acumen as his best selling point.
No doubt about it: Mitt Romney has demonstrated that he is a
highly successful business executive. He made hundreds of millions for his
company when he headed Bain, and then did a competent job as the leader of the
business called the Olympics. As governor of Massachusetts, he had no great
ideas, but he competently administered and implemented the ideas of
others—including the healthcare reform system that was the model for Obamacare
(see Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction
for details).
But while admiring Romney’s success in business, we should
also remain aware of the drawbacks and baggage that expertise brings.
First and foremost, business executives are amoral and
emotional—they’re taught to be that way in business school and business
seminars. As Michael Corleone, the
fictional leader of the mythic American family business once put it, “It’s not
personal. It’s strictly business.”
Business executives who don’t cultivate this attitude can’t lay off
people, deny someone a raise, take a sneaky loophole out of a contract, shut
down manufacturing facilities in one-plant towns, hotly pursue the business of despicable
individuals, steal accounts from competitors, or play hardball with unions.
That’s why it’s so easy for a successful business executive
such as Lou Gerstner to go from one industry to another and keep achieving
business success.
What that means is that Mitt Romney will do a competent job
implementing the program of whoever is pulling his strings. Kind of like Albert Speer, Hitler’s talented
Nazi architect and executive. Now don’t
get me wrong, I’m not conflating Romney with the Nazis. That would be like
labeling as a Socialist a Democrat slightly to the right of Dwight
Eisenhower—say, Barack Obama.
Although it is true that Romney’s current masters want to
end a woman’s right to have an abortion, severely limit her access to birth
control, turn back the clock on gay rights and end the teaching of science in
the schools. The Nazis did believe in most if not all of these ideas.
Another thing to remember about the business executive is
that the definition of success is nothing more nor less than return of maximum value to the investors.
A company may pollute, create unsafe conditions for employees, pay its workers
low wages and create social problems wherever it establishes operations, e.g.
Walmart, and still be considered successful because the investors all get rich.
Romney is used to defining success as creating wealth for
the few, and that’s exactly what you want in a business leader, even if you are
enlightened enough to include the employees among the happy few. Mitt’s
admitted economic program suggests that he will continue to follow that basic
strategy as president.
But the objective of a country is to protect and provide
opportunities for all its citizens. This
idea is inherent in our important early documents such as the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And one can read the
history of the United States as a great struggle to extend rights, protection
and opportunities to more and more of our people.
Sometimes the issue in an election is competence. That was
certainly the case in 1960 between Nixon and Kennedy, when both sides shared
exactly the same foreign policy and were coalescing around the same set of
ideas to address domestic challenges. The same can be said about the election
of 1976 between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
But in 2012 the issue is ideology, which is a bit ironic,
since one of the candidates has demonstrated that he has none. All he wants to do is do the best job he
possibly can for whoever is paying the bill.
In the case of Romney, it’s the extreme social and economic right, which
wants to send the country back to medieval times.
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