All of this makes sense, of course, when you consider the
failures of the man they’re all trying to replace, the man whose name not one
of the Republican presidential candidates dared to mention on Wednesday. While
Romney would be the second president in a row with an MBA from Harvard Business School,
his unspoken message is that he wouldn’t have botched Hurricane Katrina and the
Iraq War; he wouldn’t have run up record deficits; and he certainly wouldn’t
have hired and held onto loyalists like Michael Brown and Alberto Gonzales. In
its recent endorsement,
the National Review explicitly
stated: “At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too
often the Bush Administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven
executive skill.”
When it comes to managerial competence, Republicans can be
expected to play offense as well as defense. They’ll present the Democratic
presidential nominee--who almost certainly will be a current or former senator--as
a talker, not a doer. While the Republican nominee can be expected to say that
his rival “never ran anything,” there will be an ideological subtext: She or he
doesn’t know how the world really works and will indulge in social engineering
at home and appeasement abroad.
In 1988, another Massachusetts
governor, Michael Dukakis, said the presidential election was about
“competence, not ideology.” But, for Mitt Romney and his rivals, managerial
competence is an ideology--if they were to assign Bush’s failings to anything other than incompetence (like,
say, an inherently flawed governing philosophy), their entire world would
implode--so count on this election to be about executives and managerialism,
not evangelicalism and Mormonism.