I. CHURCH

This summer, I spent most of an afternoon in Salt Lake City with Douglas Anderson, a friend of Mitt Romney’s. Anderson lives in a housing development in the foothills of the mountains that rise to the east of the city. We met in his living room, which leads to a patio with a view across the Great Basin—a view that isn’t so different from the one that the first Mormon settlers in Utah had as they crossed the mountains, except that what you see now is prosperous urban sprawl, not a desert. Anderson, a bald, amiable man in his early sixties, is a Democrat, but, like Romney, he is a Mormon, with deep roots in Utah; he is part of the business-school and management-consulting worlds; and his father always made it clear that holding a high political office would be the excellent culmination of a career. In Belmont, Massachusetts, where both men lived for years, Anderson was the Romney family’s “home teacher,” assigned by the Church to pay monthly visits to support the family and its religious life and to offer a little guidance. In 1989, Anderson and his family moved to Salt Lake City. On the coffee table in the living room was a large, leather-bound copy of the Book of Mormon. Above the desk in Anderson’s study was a picture of Jesus Christ standing on a high bluff and looking down into a valley, with the caption “Oh, Jerusalem! Oh, Jerusalem!”

Mitt Romney’s time at business school coincided with the waning of big corporations and the beginning of the rise of finance. Illustration by Barry Blitt

Anderson told me an almost surreal story about his first encounter with Romney, in 1968. Anderson was a freshman at Stanford. Romney had been a student there in 1965-66, before he left for France, to do the missionary work that young Mormons pursue. Anderson was walking across the campus one day when a student he hardly knew approached him. “Are you a Mormon?” the young man asked. Anderson said yes. “Do you know Mitt Romney?” No. “Mitt Romney is the finest person I have ever known!” Then he walked away.

Another Mormon friend who shares Romney’s background (church, business school, long residence in Belmont, Massachusetts) is Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor and renowned management guru. He remembers first encountering Romney in an economics class at Brigham Young University, in 1970, just after Romney returned from his mission and married Ann Davies, his high-school sweetheart. “He was the big man on campus,” Christensen told me. He owned an A.M.C. Javelin, the hottest car made by the auto company that his father, George Romney, had run. “He had a beautiful wife. His father was famous, he was handsome. Everybody wanted to be what Mitt was.”

Inside the world that Mitt Romney inhabits, he has always been a person of destiny. It isn’t just that he is the son of a corporate chief executive, governor, and Presidential candidate. He is the scion of one of the most prominent Mormon families, with a direct connection to the Church’s founding prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. The Romneys converted in England and came to the United States in 1841. The first American member of the family, Miles Park Romney, was born in the short-lived paradise of Nauvoo, Illinois, over which Joseph Smith presided. After Smith’s martyrdom, the Romneys took part in the terrible forced exodus that ended in Utah. Mitt Romney was born in 1947, the year of the centennial of the Mormons’ arrival there. The youngest of four siblings by six years, he was born when his parents were middle-aged. Romney, with his square jaw and brilliantined hair and old-school cultural references, is a throwback to an earlier time. His father and mother were born in 1907 and 1908; his oldest sister was born before either of Barack Obama’s parents.

Romney often comes across as not being able to relate to mainstream American life. In his astonishing performance before a group of rich donors in Boca Raton, Florida, in May, recently made public by Mother Jones, he said that the forty-seven per cent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes are never going to vote for him, because they think of themselves as “victims” and “believe that government has a responsibility to care for them.” That forty-seven per cent includes millions of people who do pay payroll taxes, and retirees, and people who are disabled and unemployed. You’d expect somebody who proposes to run the federal government to know that. One could see Romney simply as a rich person who thinks the way many rich people must think; one could see him as a super fund-raiser who is good at telling a certain kind of wealthy audience what he believes it wants to hear; or one could see him simply as somebody who can’t connect to outsiders in any natural way, who goes through life trying one somewhat forced and awkward technique after another, because he thinks he has to keep his real self private. It isn’t easy to comprehend what sort of heart and soul and mind produced those remarks. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him.

Romney, on his mission in France, lived a life oddly similar, in its daily texture, at least, to Obama’s as a community organizer in Chicago: long, penurious days spent knocking on strangers’ doors, “tracting” in the hope of finding someone who wanted to hear Joseph Smith’s miraculous story. But in 1968, toward the end of his mission, Romney had several unsettling experiences. He was in an auto accident in which a passenger in the car he was driving was killed. When the French student protests broke out, members of Romney’s mission (who were garbed, “Matrix”-like, in white shirts, black suits, and skinny ties) saw them as a terrifying example of the threat posed by the left. And Romney’s father, long considered the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, was dropping out of the race, before the first primary.

These days, people often describe Romney as an old-fashioned “Rockefeller Republican”—moderate on social issues, internationalist on foreign policy, and pro-Wall Street—who is pretending to be more conservative out of expediency. This is misleading on two counts. In the heyday of Rockefeller Republicanism, George Romney’s billboards in New Hampshire said, “The Way to Stop Crime Is to Stop Moral Decay.” And that campaign resulted in an enduring sense in the family of personal bitterness and betrayal toward Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York.

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Just after the 1966 midterm elections, Rockefeller summoned George Romney to one of the family’s properties, the Dorado Beach hotel, in Puerto Rico, and promised him full support in the 1968 Presidential primaries and election. This meant that Romney would begin the race with the delegations of Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania in his pocket (the governor of Pennsylvania had allied himself with Rockefeller), plus a panoply of Rockefeller connections, funding sources, and policy advisers, including Henry Kissinger. Yet he was not remotely an establishment figure. In “The Making of the President 1968,” Theodore H. White wrote, wonderingly, “Somewhere out beyond the Alleghenies the old culture of America still persists, people who think Boy Scouts are good, who believe that divorce is bad, who teach Bible classes on Sunday, enjoy church suppers, wash their children’s mouths with soap to purge dirty words, who regard homosexuals as wicked, whose throat chokes up when an American flag is marched by on the Fourth of July.” (All five of Mitt Romney’s sons were Boy Scouts and three became Eagle Scouts.) The Old Guard, White thought, would never put up with this sort of character: “There is a natural timberline in national politics beyond which certain kinds of men cannot thrive.”

More specifically, Rockefeller, who could never completely give up the idea of himself as President, began to hint that he might get into the race after all. At a certain point, it was made clear to Romney that all those Rockefeller resources were not going to be available to him. Romney bowed out, feeling that he had been played for a fool; Rockefeller never entered the race. In March, 1968, Michael Bush, a member of Mitt Romney’s mission in France, wrote to his mother, “Mitt Romney is working in Bordeaux now. We were together a while this morning and of course we discussed politics. (Politics is often a missionary discussion topic.) It was interesting to hear about George Romney from the inside. It appears that Rockefeller gave Romney a dirty deal. In a letter Elder R. received just after his Dad’s withdrawal, Gov. Romney explained that the poor predictions for New Hampshire were not the reason he withdrew. It was because Rockefeller was stepping out of the non-candidacy ranks. Rockefeller had ardently promised his support, right down to the line—winner or loser, but when he said that he would accept a draft, Romney doubted his sincerity and told Rocky that he knew then that he had been a stalking horse.”

Was that when the seed of Mitt Romney’s Presidential candidacy was planted? We’ll never know, because Romney and his friends are wedded, no doubt sincerely, to the standard Republican rhetoric about his political ambition as a matter of “being of service” and “giving back.” If the seed was planted back then, one of the lessons plainly was that you want to be the guy in the race who has the most money, not the guy who is dependent on the guy with the most money.

Like most élites, the Mormon élite is a small world where everybody knows and has close ties to everybody else. One of the important Mormon families is the Eyrings. Henry Eyring, like George Romney, was born in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century. Mormons had established a colony there, so that they could continue to practice polygamy. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, Eyring was a distinguished chemistry professor at Princeton. His son Henry B. Eyring, who taught at Stanford Business School, is now the second-ranking official in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with the title First Counsellor in the First Presidency. In 2006, Henry B.’s son, Henry J., gave up a career at the management-consulting firm Monitor, where Mitt Romney’s eldest son, Tagg, has worked. The Church assigned him to a team in charge of transforming a small two-year Mormon college in Rexburg, Idaho, into a major Mormon university, called B.Y.U.-Idaho. In 2005, Kim Clark, the dean of Harvard Business School, became president of B.Y.U.-Idaho; for many years in Belmont, Mitt Romney was home teacher for Clark’s seven children.

When I visited Rexburg, Henry Eyring, a rail-thin, bald man in his late forties, gave me a tour of the campus, which consists of new brick and stone buildings separated by well-tended lawns and paths. A large temple stands next to the campus. Our tour ended in the main auditorium, which seats fifteen thousand, so that the entire student body can worship together. We sat down in the balcony and talked. “My great-great-grandmother was a Romney,” Eyring said. “That’s the family connection. In fact, my grandfather’s father was married to two Romney sisters. They were driven out of the United States, to Mexico. Then they were driven out of Mexico, by Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. They lived in a stockyard in El Paso for a year, and then in Pima, Arizona. The middle of nowhere. But they got an education. There is within us, as a people, a drive to get all the education you can, to conquer the wilderness, if you will. We must become all we can be. We must master our circumstances—we as a family. Not for aggrandizement. For self-actualization, as Abraham Maslow would say. Let’s go to Zion.”

The heads of B.Y.U.-Idaho and Brigham Young’s other sister school, in Hawaii, are former Harvard Business School professors. Three of Mitt Romney’s sons have Harvard M.B.A.s. I asked Eyring why so many prominent Mormons are attracted to business school. The educational ethic, he said, is “to be intellectually curious but to be practical. That will take a disproportionate portion of the population into commerce—schools of business. Make the desert blossom as the rose, in the words of Isaiah. The two most significant graduate schools in the Mormon educational system are business and law. There is a great interest in executive leadership. You’re talking to a J.D./M.B.A. Mitt is a J.D./M.B.A. When a Mormon goes to law school, he rarely thinks about law firms. It’s more about government and diplomacy.” Eyring noted that Joseph Smith’s expulsion from one state after another, and his murder in Illinois, impressed on Mormons the importance of being empowered participants in government. “We are interested in law because of governance, business because of building things. Mitt’s father moved back and forth across the line. You have to be a builder. You can build it in business, or you can build it in government. You are not going to be driven out of your home. You will not be persecuted. You will be safe. You will get an education. You can advance.”

Some weeks later, in Boston, I asked Clayton Christensen the same question. “Let me give you a two-minute history of Christianity,” he said. “In 300 A.D., the leaders decided they had all the answers. God doesn’t give you a new answer until you ask a question. The leaders had the New Testament. It had all the answers. God had given them revelation. What’s unique about Mormonism is that, starting with Joseph Smith, we started asking questions of God that we didn’t have the answers to. The intellectual curiosity: we, or the Prophet, ask God.” He went on, “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.”

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There is a special intensity in the playing out of Mormon culture across American society, because it is an American religion, whose canonical events took place here, not all that long ago. Back in Rexburg, I asked Kim Clark what in Mormon culture generates such an intense preoccupation with business. Henry Eyring identified business with building and practicality; Clark identified business with personal leadership, which is also a preoccupation of Mitt Romney’s. “There are aspects of the doctrine, the practice, the experience that prepare people well for leadership,” he said. “My mother, every day, would look me in the eye and say to me, ‘You are a leader! Stand up for what you believe in. Don’t let people drag you around by the nose. You have a responsibility to your heavenly father. You have a responsibility to do your very best.’ And on my way out the door she’d add, ‘You remember who you are. People sacrificed for you. They died so you could have what you have.’ I’m sure I’m not the only L.D.S. child who heard that from his mom. That came out of the pioneer experience. It’s deeply ingrained. Being persecuted, driven across the country. I was five! And then the Church gives you those leadership opportunities. For little kids, three years old, there’s something called Primary. I gave my first talk to an organization when I was four or five years old. At twelve, they put you in a leadership position. At nineteen, you get sent on a mission. At twenty, you’re responsible for other missionaries, and it’s serious. It’s people’s lives. All through your experience, you’re trained to be a leader.”

II. BUSINESS

All of us see the course of our lives as particular, and Mitt and Ann Romney tell their story that way. But Romney’s life as a young man took a typical path for a devout Mormon: freshman year of college, then a mission abroad, then an early marriage and enrollment at Brigham Young (where it is not uncommon for more than half the class to be married when they graduate). Ann, also the child of a businessman, and brought up as a lightly affiliated Episcopalian, converted to Mormonism. The marriage took place twice, once in Michigan, so that her parents could attend, and then in the magnificent temple in Salt Lake City (which only Mormons with a “temple recommend” can enter). From Brigham Young, Romney went to Harvard, where, as a compromise with his father, he enrolled in both the law school (his father’s preference) and the business school. Romney was a golden boy there, as he had been at Stanford, on mission, and at Brigham Young.

When Romney was at Harvard Business School, all second-year students were required to read Alfred P. Sloan’s “My Years with General Motors.” In the decades after the Second World War, G.M. was one of the most successful institutions in America, the sort of place where the brightest Harvard Business School graduates dreamed of working. The most influential figures in business were the chief executives of large corporations. Wall Street, in those days, was a sleepy backwater, and it was almost unimaginably less important to American economic life than it is now.

In the nineteen-seventies, the balance of power began to shift from production to capital, and corporate America started to seem lumbering and inefficient. This shift was the business world’s version of the sixties—one (younger and impatient) group of politically conservative businesspeople challenging another (older and more traditional) group. The field of battle was not politics, culture, dress, or taste in music. It was the American corporation, and the consequences for the whole society were profound. The business sixties wound up rearranging most of the American economy. General Motors has fewer than half as many employees today as it did in 1955, and, among the American corporations that were great at mid-century, it’s hardly alone. George Romney was an organization man. Mitt Romney became a transaction man: someone who moves assets around with a speed and force that leaves many of the rest of us bewildered. The insurrection in business has profoundly affected the lives of most people who work, pay taxes, and get government benefits. It is the backdrop to this Presidential election.

By the time Romney graduated, in 1975, the best students at Harvard Business School were dreaming not of rising through the management ranks at an industrial company but of working in the financial world or at strategic-consulting companies. The most prestigious of these was a relatively new boutique firm called Boston Consulting Group, and Mitt Romney got his first job after business school there. The mystique of B.C.G. and its founder, Bruce Henderson, couldn’t have been more different from that of Alfred Sloan and G.M. B.C.G. was small, and it didn’t run or make anything; it merely gave advice. Corporations with tens of thousands of career employees brought in teams of five or six people from B.C.G. to spend a few months studying their business and then tell them how to become more economically powerful, by making structural and strategic changes. The consultants interviewed employees and customers and suppliers, and got competitors’ public data filings. They analyzed the information using techniques that Henderson and his colleagues had developed, with names like the experience curve and the growth-share matrix. B.C.G., its older and bigger competitor McKinsey, and many imitators helped to break apart the corporate structures of postwar America and reconfigure them.

Romney was an ideal consultant: polite, well trained in presentation skills, and, as the son of one corporate executive and the namesake of another (he is Willard Mitt Romney, after Willard Marriott, the leading Mormon business executive of the late nineteen-forties), comfortable in a boardroom. Kim Clark says that Romney was “very smart, but also great with senior executives, really capable of developing relationships with them. You have to be really good on your feet, good at understanding what people’s concerns are and how they think.”

In 1973, Bruce Henderson’s second-in-command at B.C.G., Bill Bain, left to start his own strategic-consulting firm. Slight, neat, and quiet, Bain was a former fund-raiser for Vanderbilt University, with no formal training in business or economics. Bain & Company worked for only one company in an industry, under conditions of high secrecy. Its consultants were recruited with obsessive attention to brains, impeccable dress, manner, and credentials. Whether it was the atmospheric sizzle or the analytic steak, Bain & Company prospered.

Often, the top few strategic-consulting firms were competing for the same work, so a slight edge in the youthful perfection of one’s M.B.A.s could tip the balance. In 1977, B.C.G. put Romney in charge of recruiting at Harvard Business School. Midway through the recruiting season, Bill Bain persuaded Romney to leave B.C.G. and become Bain’s chief recruiter at Harvard. “So the person who was saying, ‘Join B.C.G.,’ was now saying, ‘Join Bain,’ ” Clayton Christensen says. “Mitt is so persuasive. He could get rich selling used bubble gum. That gave Bain the critical mass to compete with B.C.G.”

Sometimes large historical developments are obvious only in retrospect. In 1979, an obscure division of the U.S. Department of Labor in charge of regulating pension funds loosened something called the “prudent man rule,” enabling funds to invest more aggressively, for higher returns. Organizations like the California state employees’ pension fund and the teachers’ retirement system of Texas suddenly became power players in American capitalism. So did university and foundation endowments and, later, sovereign-wealth funds. The people running these large pools of capital invested to get the best returns, and so helped to drive the remaking of companies, the restructuring of the workforce, and globalization. When the country was dominated by large, established institutions, workers were, often implicitly, guaranteed job security and comfortable benefits. In the new economy, these arrangements were eroded, which put pressure on the political system to pick up the slack.

Meanwhile, the hot shots at strategic-consulting firms were becoming frustrated. Sometimes their clients made a great deal of money thanks to their advice, while the firms got only a fraction of what they saw as the value of their work. Conversely, clients were free to ignore their advice, or to be slow about implementing it. In 1976, two members of the faculty at the University of Rochester’s business school, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, published an article in the obscure Journal of Financial Economics called “Theory of the Firm: Managerial Behavior, Agency Costs and Ownership Structure.” It provided the intellectual foundation for bringing together one set of ideas about how to change the ownership structure of a company with another set of ideas about how to change the way it operated. That consolidation led to the creation of Bain Capital, in 1984, and made Mitt Romney very rich.

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Jensen and Meckling argued that publicly held corporations were poorly managed, because their chief executives, with their generous salaries and high job security, had no real incentive to “maximize the value of the firm.” If a company could be restructured so that it was run by the owner, and if it could take on a lot of new debt that it had to pay down with cash, then it would maximize its value, rather than the comfort and prestige of its C.E.O. In the nineteen-eighties, Harvard Business School hired Michael Jensen as a faculty member, and the battles between him and the pro-corporate professors defined the intellectual life of the school just as much as the battles over critical legal studies defined Harvard Law School when Obama was a student there. Jensen argued in favor of junk bonds, hostile takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and stock options for chief executives. Mitt Romney and others, with these new techniques at their disposal, were able to raise pools of capital and use it to slice, dice, and rearrange the American economy. In a speech in 1993, Jensen announced that the country was experiencing a “third industrial revolution.” It was as economically consequential, he said, and likely to become as politically and culturally controversial, as the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century.

One day in the early eighties, a note appeared on the bulletin board at Bain & Company, saying that anyone interested in starting a new venture-capital fund should get in touch with Mitt Romney. Bain Capital was modest when it launched (the first investment pool was thirty-seven million dollars), and agnostic about whether it borrowed money to buy existing businesses or built new businesses with its own money. One of its first two ventures, a small airline that ran military shuttles between Tonopah, Nevada, and Las Vegas, was in the first category. The other, an eye-surgery business headquartered in Boston, was in the second. So was Staples, Romney’s favorite example of a Bain Capital investment. The consultants were going to bring their consulting skills to bear on the companies they owned, and, as owners, they could guarantee that their advice would be taken. (Bain & Company had unsuccessfully suggested the eye-surgery company, MediVision, to one of its clients, Bausch & Lomb.)

But, within a few years, Bain Capital had become almost completely a buyout firm: it bought businesses, retooled them, and resold them. The returns were typically much higher than they were from investing in start-ups. Buying assets with borrowed money can be spectacularly profitable if the asset can be resold at a higher price. After Romney left Bain Capital, the head of the management committee was Bob Gay, whose father, a prominent Mormon and a friend of George Romney’s, ran Howard Hughes’s business empire. Gay was brought in because he was a Wall Street guy who knew the deal business.

When a company is acquired by a private-equity firm, something dramatic is guaranteed to happen to it. The debt increases the cost of doing business, because of interest payments. The investors have to get their money back within ten years. And the deal has to generate income for the private-equity firm. Some moribund companies are turned around or fruitfully combined with a powerful new partner; some close plants and lay off workers; some take on debt just to pay fees to the investors; some are sold and then go bankrupt.

Even as Bain Capital was making a lot of its money in buyouts, it still took pride in its consulting skills. Romney likes to say that he was a consultant or a venture capitalist, not that he was in private equity. Consultants think that people in private equity make most of their money from the way a deal is structured (Bain Capital aggressively pursued that aspect of its business), not from how well they analyze a company and its problems. Some Bainies liked to talk about “the nuclear reactor”: their all-powerful analytic methods, which the dummies on Wall Street didn’t have. They weren’t traders; they were efficiency experts. What they did wasn’t mere “financial engineering”; it was “operational engineering.” They replaced management, reorganized the supply chain, upgraded equipment, changed the accounting system. Romney loved to order up charts and graphs; in his personal pantheon of admirability “data” ranks right up there with “leadership.” During meetings, he still challenges the person making the PowerPoint presentation, poking holes in the argument, demanding different ways to solve the problem. In his own mind, he is a master chief executive who started a very successful business that brought a particular approach to problems—not a guy who used debt to buy and resell businesses.

Bain Capital did many dozens of deals under Romney. One of them involved a carpet company in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, called Masland, which had been owned and operated by one family for four generations. It went public in the nineteen-sixties. In 1986, it was acquired in a hostile takeover by Burlington Industries. The next year, Burlington itself came under attack from a corporate raider, and it arranged a leveraged buyout with Morgan Stanley. Desperate for cash, it put Masland up for sale. Bain Capital bought the company, which by that time was largely selling interior components to the auto business. Before making the deal, Romney flew to Detroit with the C.E.O. of the company, Bill Branch, and met with Masland’s biggest customer, Ford, to make sure that it would stay on board after the deal. Then Romney helped the company acquire another interior-components supplier, in Wisconsin, which had General Motors as a customer. In 1993, only two and a half years after the acquisition by Bain, Masland went public. On the profits from that transaction, Bain made seven times its initial investment. In 1996, Masland was merged with an auto-parts company called Lear. In 2005, Lear formed a partnership with W. L. Ross & Company, a big New York private-equity firm. In 2008, the original Masland manufacturing plant, in Carlisle, which at its peak had employed a thousand workers, shut down. So goes the transactional society, as it plays out across the middle range of the economy and the middle of the country.

Three years after Bain Capital was founded, Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” came out. Gordon Gekko, its protagonist, expressed his greed by doing buyout deals. A few years later, in “Pretty Woman,” Richard Gere was a private-equity guy who redeemed himself by falling in love with Julia Roberts and cancelling his plans to buy a company and do all the things that private-equity firms do. In popular culture, private equity had become the most conveniently available symbol of everything that people didn’t like about the transactional economy. In 1994, when Romney ran for the U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy’s campaign figured out (as President Obama’s campaign has this year) that an essential element of a race against Romney was to run against the private-equity business.

Within private equity, people don’t talk about the questions that are on the mind of the public. One professor at a leading business school whose subject is private equity put it simply: “Can I change the free cash-flow equation of the company? If I do, I win. If I don’t, I lose. It’s not the job of private equity to create jobs. The job is to create value. That sometimes creates jobs, and sometimes not.” A comprehensive study of private equity published last year found that the industry has a negligible effect on employment. Private equity is business on steroids: seek efficiency and economic return, not large social goals (unless you think those are large social goals). Because Mitt Romney is incapable of explaining his career in a way that makes it sound admirable to people who aren’t in business, the country, for now, is directing at him its very mixed feelings about the financialization of the American economy.

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Everyone who knows Romney agrees that his father is unusually important to him. “His dad is his biggest hero,” says Ben Coes, who managed Romney’s successful 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts, seven years after George Romney’s death. “He thinks about him at least once an hour, if not more. He worships the guy.” In 1994, just after his unsuccessful Senate campaign, Romney called William Weld, then the governor of Massachusetts, to ask if he could stop by with his dad to talk about volunteerism. “Mitt and his father came in,” Weld remembers. “I got out from behind my desk. George talks for forty-five or sixty minutes, with one or two interjections by me. Mitt not only didn’t say a word; his eyes never left his father’s face. The expression in his eyes was hero worship. . . . And six months later his father was dead.”

When Mitt Romney announced that he was going to run against Ted Kennedy, George Romney started making appearances at the Bain Capital office. He was delighted by Mitt’s decision, and evidently thought of politics as a higher calling than business. For Mitt, honoring and pleasing his father seems to have been the highest calling of all. Finally, in George Romney’s mind, his son’s real career had begun.

III. POLITICS

Just about the only thing in life that Mitt Romney is obviously not very good at is the public aspect of running for office. During his four campaigns for office—U.S. senator, in 1994; governor, in 2002; President, in 2008 and 2012—he must have undergone endless hours of training and practice, but the magic just isn’t there. In June, I spent a few days on the campaign trail with him, in Wisconsin and Iowa. Romney’s trip had several purposes. A film crew was gathering footage for campaign commercials to run in the fall; Romney stopped in Janesville, Wisconsin, talking privately and doing an event with Paul Ryan, soon to be his running mate; and it was another attempt, apparently fruitless, on the part of the campaign to demonstrate the candidate’s concern with ordinary people. This segment was officially called the “Every Town Counts” tour. Romney rode around in a sleek bus painted with all-American scenes of mountains, church steeples, and ships in harbors.

Romney cannot light up a crowd. He dresses the way one is supposed to dress (checked shirt, no tie), he dutifully repeats his applause lines at every stop (“Last time there was hope and change—this time it’s ‘We hope to change the subject’ ”), he takes his body through motions and gestures meant to read as forceful and high-energy—and nothing happens. This summer, his audiences were strikingly small, and white, and middle-aged or older.

One problem is that Romney’s voice lacks resonance and range. Another is that, even in brief appearances, he tends to offer up three- and five-point policy plans that bore the audience. He talks to voters businessman to businessman, on the assumption that everybody either runs a business or wants to start one. Romney believes that if you drop the name of someone who has built a very successful company—Sam Walton, of Wal-Mart, or Ray Kroc, of McDonald’s—it will have the same effect as mentioning a sports hero. And Romney’s political references (the Dodd-Frank financial-reform law, the organized-labor cause known as “card check,” Obama’s failure to negotiate new free-trade agreements) don’t register much with the people who turn up at rallies. He sounds like someone speaking at a Rotary Club luncheon in the nineteen-fifties.

The weekend before the Republican Convention, I travelled to Powell, Ohio, a picture-postcard small town just outside Columbus, where there was a Romney rally early on a Saturday morning. Ryan spoke before Romney. He was loud and kinetic, and full of cultural references (football, deer hunting, Catholicism), which got far more applause than his comments on economics and policy.

When Romney took the stage, he picked up on the distant shouts of a group of protesters who were outside the security perimeter of the rally, and began to riff. He referred to the protesters as a Greek chorus, went on to recall the grandiose Greek columns that stood behind Obama when he accepted the Democratic nomination in Denver, in 2008, and finally arrived at the Greek fiscal crisis and how the Obama Administration was leading America in that direction. His punch line was “Everything they do reminds us of Greece!” Then he predicted that although Obama would accept the nomination this year at the Bank of America Arena, in Charlotte, he would not call the arena by its name, because he would never acknowledge a bank. Then it was on to Chinese-currency policy.

After the rally, I interviewed Romney. He was sitting at a folding Formica-topped table in a corner of the town’s city-council chamber, with his travelling press aide, Rick Gorka, at his side. Romney has done a lot of meeting and a lot of selling during his rise in business and politics, but mainly indoors, in small groups of peers. He’s as adept in that setting as he is unnatural talking to a big crowd. Unlike most candidates, he did not communicate a sense either of being too restless to give you his full attention or of having to establish that he is the alpha and you the beta. He was direct and pleasant and engaged. His voice sounded husky, rather than flat. His gestures seemed spontaneous, not staged.

Because Romney’s answers to the standard political questions are usually scripted and unrevealing, I asked him about business. Why had General Motors, the economic titan of his youth, fallen so low?

“My dad had a statement he would make that proved to be true in this industry, as in all others,” Romney said. “I remember, as a boy, saying to him, ‘Dad, we make the best cars, don’t we?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘Then why don’t we sell the most cars?’ And he said, Well, someday we may. And he said, ‘Because, Mitt’—and this is a quote—‘there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.’ And the auto industry, in particular General Motors, was so successful for so long that it didn’t recognize the need to innovate, to become more productive, to become more efficient, or it would ultimately be vulnerable to foreign competition. So the industry itself, its managers, made some critical mistakes.”

Romney ticked off the mistakes. “One, they agreed to union contracts that were uncompetitive with those of other companies around the world, and ultimately with the so-called transplants, foreign companies doing business in the U.S.,” he said. “By calculations that some consulting firms did, a U.S. car was two thousand dollars more expensive to build than a comparable foreign product.” He added, “The benefit packages, the work rules, the wages, and other decisions by the management were not consistent with the need to be more competitive.”

I asked Romney how he would reconcile this account with the central theory of his first employer, the Boston Consulting Group, that experience gives a company a powerful economic advantage. Actually, he said, Bruce Henderson’s insight was tempered by the word “could.” A successful company could have low costs, it could make a better product, and it could have a highly profitable run. “But if companies become complacent,” he went on, “in my dad’s lexicon, they could become more vulnerable. And the history—I.B.M., Western Union, A.T. & T., the history of the great nations of the earth, the great empires of the earth—there’s nothing as vulnerable as entrenched success.

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“And there are some enterprises that have found that they can, despite their huge success, reinvigorate themselves, reinvent themselves, and maintain their lead. G.E. did that under Jack Welch,” he said. “Bruce Henderson’s vision was important because it said what’s important is not just how good you are as a company; it is how good you are relative to your competition. . . . And Bill Bain’s innovation was to go one step further, and to say, ‘We don’t just give the company a road map; we help them implement that road map.’ Because giving someone an answer without actually helping them implement it will often not yield a result. So both firms, Boston Consulting Group and Bain, and then ultimately McKinsey and others, all caught on to the same vision, which is: help American and foreign companies recognize that they must change to survive.”

Romney clearly loved talking about this, and he was showing how he thinks about running things, including the federal government. The motif of understanding business and government in terms of a competition between entrenched, unproductive costs and efficient investments, which animates the video of the talk to donors in Boca Raton, ran through our conversation. He went on, “I’ve seen, for instance, in a company like Marriott International—you have Bill Marriott, who is the chief executive officer there, and there’s the Host Hotels, which was part of the company at one point. It’s now a separate company. It’s headed by another Marriott brother, Dick Marriott. Both of them have been highly successful over many decades . . . and their chief executives are constantly pushing the businesses to become more efficient, more customer-friendly, to expand into new markets.”

He led into a discussion of politics by talking about the strategic myopia of many business executives. “They agree to actions which are good on a short-term basis but may be more hazardous long term. And so, for instance, if you’re the chief executive officer of General Motors back in the nineteen-seventies and a contract comes forward which has onerous legacy costs, why, you know that those costs are not going to be borne on your term, because it’s going to be done for future retirees. And so you might agree to something that is harmful to the company long term but, by the way, beneficial short term, because who wants to take a strike, to prevent a provision that’s going to hurt ten years or twenty years down the road?