Mitt Romney has been successful at most of the major endeavors of his adult life. By the standards of the private-equity world, Bain Capital was a wild success when he led it in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. In 2002, he really did revive the failing Winter Olympics. His tenure as governor of Massachusetts was mixed—he was not very popular in the state by the end of his term—but he did pass one of the most innovative health-care laws in the nation. And he hasn’t fared too poorly in Presidential politics. He started seeking the nomination of his party in 2007, and he is now tantalizingly close to securing it.

When he ran in the 2008 campaign, many armchair political strategists noted that he made an enormous strategic error: rather than campaigning as a business consultant and turnaround artist, Romney twisted himself into a right-wing social conservative, which was not true to his history. One of his former aides told me this was because the ideological “shelf space” available in that race was to the right of John McCain. This time around, Romney adopted a strategy much more in line with his background. Rather than talking about God all the time, he talks about how his business-consulting experience has prepared him to turn around the economy. If you look fairly at his record at Bain, the Olympics, and the governorship of Massachusetts, I think you have to conclude that he has the requisite leadership and decision-making skills to be President.

But what became clear this week is that Romney made a major mistake in the way he chose to describe his professional experiences. Instead of simply emphasizing that he was a turnaround expert, someone whose managerial skills and business competence would help fix everything, Romney insisted that his great achievement in life has been creating jobs—specifically, 100,000 jobs while at Bain. As The Wall Street Journal and others have now made clear, “creating jobs” was never a metric that Bain used to define success, and, frankly, is not a metric that any company uses to define success. Independent fact-checkers have declared Romney’s 100,000 figure somewhere between phony and unverifiable. It is now one of the most important claims of this campaign for journalists to substantiate. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Romney’s success depends on whether that job-creation statement withstands scrutiny.

Ironically, Romney has made a similar mistake to the one the Obama Administration made in early 2009, when two of Obama’s economists released a study with overly optimistic unemployment projections. Ever since then, critics have been able to point to that study as evidence that, if judged by Obama’s own standard, his stimulus has been a failure. We could end up with a race that pits Obama’s stimulus record against Romney’s Bain record. Judging from the gleeful reaction of Democrats this week, it’s a debate Obama would welcome.

Photograph by Mark Wilson/Getty Images.