This past weekend featured a most instructive compare-and-contrast about Mitt Romney in the national newspaper Big Dogs.
From the Weekend Interview in the Wall Street Journal:
On Taxes, ‘Modeling,’ and the Vision Thing
Does Mitt Romney have a governing vision, a dominating set of political principles? It’s the big question many voters say they have about the GOP presidential candidate. So when the former Massachusetts governor visited the Journal editorial board this week, we put it to him squarely, if perhaps tendentiously.
And the answer is, Mr. Romney?
“People who know me from my years at Bain Capital, Bain and Company, the Olympics and Massachusetts wouldn’t say he was successful because he was a great manager. They’d say I was successful because I was a leader, that I had a vision of how to change the enterprise, any one of those three enterprises, to make it greater.”
And that vision is? Mr. Romney says he’s running “to return America to the principles that we were founded upon.”
Then again, in a Sunday New York Times piece headlined, “At Harvard, a Master’s in Problem Solving,” people who know Romney from his years at Bain Capital and etc. said quite the opposite.
Eager, driven and tremendously hardworking, [Romney] mastered the Harvard Business School method of literally looking at the world on a case-by-case basis, approaching each problem completely on its own terms and making recommendations based on data.
In the classrooms where Mr. Romney distinguished himself, there were no “right” answers — no right questions even, just a daily search for how to improve results. The Mitt Romney classmates knew then was a gifted fix-it man, attuned to the particulars of every situation he examined and eager to deliver what customers wanted.
“Mitt never struck me as an ideologue outside matters involving church and family,” saidHoward Brownstein, a classmate. “He is a relativist, a pragmatist and a problem solver.”
So, to recap:
The Wall Street Journal says Mitt Romney is a visionary.
The New York Times says he’s a non-ideological pragmatist.
You tell us.
Campaign Outsider 