Since Lanhee Chen joined the Romney campaign in March last year, his public pronouncements have been liberally seasoned with snark. Tweeting about Newt Gingrich during the first Florida debate, he wrote, “Thanks for explaining why you were forced to resign in disgrace, Mr. Speaker.” In April, he tweeted: “[David Axelrod] says Obama to be judged on his record. Like record high prices for gas?” In another tweet, he ridiculed “Obama’s ‘pretty please’ foreign policy.” And in a blog post on economic policy, Chen couldn’t resist a few personal potshots: “The President will have all year to elaborate on how his time as a community organizer helped him understand the implications of tax increases for investment decisions,” he wrote. “He can also describe for voters how his law school lecturing duties showed him the extraordinary economic potential of the nation’s energy resources.”

Chen is not the only member of the Romney team whose qualifications appear to include a set of brass knuckles. Romney’s pugnacious adviser Eric Fehrnstrom, for instance, is a proud alumnus of Boston’s take-no-prisoners tabloid culture. But Chen is the campaign’s policy director, a position generally occupied by more wonky types who refrain from day-to-day brawling.

And yet that hasn’t stopped him from routinely indulging in some fact-free mudslinging. In January, he characterized Obama’s tenure as “an unmitigated disaster” that has brought about “one of the most anti-competitive, anti-business-friendly environments in the entire world.” A few months later, he asserted that the president has a point of view that “punishes success.” So what is Lanhee Chen’s role in Romneyworld—egghead or hothead?





CHEN IS, by all accounts, brilliant. The 33-year-old son of Taiwanese immigrants from California’s San Gabriel Valley, he holds four degrees from Harvard—a bachelor’s, a law degree, a master’s, and a Ph.D. He worked on his master’s while shuttling between classes in Cambridge and a job in Washington. “It’s in his personality to always be doing lots of things at once,” says Bom Kim, a college friend and grad-school roommate. Kim, a Democrat, recalls having “terrific late-night conversations” about politics with Chen.

After obtaining his first degree in 1999, Chen moved to DC, where he worked at a lobbying firm and then as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, where he produced a prescient study on the potential negative effect of Republican Medicare reforms on private health care. After a stint as a senior aide in Bush’s Health and Human Services department, Chen served as Romney’s head domestic policy adviser in 2008. In 2010, he worked for California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner, for whom he wrote policy briefs outlining harsh plans for immigration enforcement. After Poizner lost, Chen went on to co-author a well-regarded paper for American Politics Research that showed the need for the next GOP presidential nominee to appeal to young and Hispanic voters.

Colleagues describe Chen as possessing an almost pathological work ethic. Tevi Troy, Chen’s superior from his days in the Bush administration, bet me that every single person I spoke to would lead by describing his smarts. (They did.) Bob Moffit, the senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who hired Chen, called him “a dynamo,” while Sidney Verba, Chen’s Ph.D adviser at Harvard for his dissertation—which examined how judicial elections affect the law—remembers him as one of his most outstanding students. Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute economist advising the Romney campaign, compared Chen to “a Jason Furman, or a Peter Orszag-type,” saying, “He’s not a person who’s going to be easy to overwhelm.”