You almost never hear Romney staff members cast their candidate in such a manner. Maybe it’s because White’s distillation calls to mind a lifelong technocrat who does whatever works rather than a conservative leader who sticks to “what’s right.” But it’s especially rare to hear the candidate or his operation refer to the period of his life when he actually did wrestle daily with both what works and what’s right on behalf of his constituents — the four years by which we can best judge what kind of president Mitt Romney might be. Drawing conclusions from his single term as Massachusetts’s chief executive is, obviously, a feat of extrapolation, because the issues that he faced as well as the powers that he wielded hardly measure up to those of the Oval Office. Still, those four years are telling, even more than the campaign’s decision not to talk about them.

To the newly elected governor of Massachusetts in January 2003, the commonwealth was a deeply flawed business model requiring sweeping remedies. He went about enacting them in the dispassionate manner of a C.E.O. Romney coaxed three non-Republicans out of the private sector and into cabinet-level positions. In addressing the state’s $3 billion deficit, “Mitt was opposed to an across-the-board cut, so we had to go through the state budget line by line, and that took an incredible amount of time and focus,” recalls his senior adviser and former chief of staff, Beth Myers. Another former Romney administration official told me that the governor’s methodology for analyzing the budget — “What’s your product line, what are you trying to achieve, whether you’re cost-effective in certain areas and whether you’re setting your prices right”— was deliberately Bain-like. Having informed Grover Norquist that he would not be signing a no-taxes pledge, the governor made creative use of various revenue streams — including raising registry deed fees that had stayed the same for decades and closing corporate tax loopholes that existed only to benefit a handful of firms.

Romney’s budget was clever but uncontroversial; the need to address the deficit was universally acknowledged, and Democrats had no appetite for increasing income taxes after having already done so the previous year. As the Massachusetts House minority leader Brad Jones told me, “The Democratic Legislature quite frankly didn’t have to do anything he wanted and could have done whatever it wanted and overridden his vetoes with ease and impunity.” Closing the deficit, in any event, was the easy part. In Romney’s appraisal of the state’s financial paradigm, much bolder moves than simple short-term reductions and increases were required. The C.E.O. relished such scenarios: his writings, his marathon policy meetings and his heritage as the son of George Romney, the American Motors Corporation chairman, revealed a fondness for unorthodox ideas.

And so the chief executive sought a complete reorganization of the state’s executive branch. He commissioned Bain to map out a dramatic restructuring of the 29 state-university campuses. He proposed a major reduction in the number of lawyer and press-secretary positions in state government, closing or merging several courts and doing away with the state’s Turnpike Authority. In a move that would be reprised years later in Wisconsin and Ohio, his administration took dead aim at public-employee pensions. “First thing we did,” a senior official recalls, “was sit down with all the unions, including the state police, and say: ‘We have new rules: you guys aren’t getting any more money than the revenue growth we’re achieving at the state level. Now go home and think about that.’ Next thing we said was, ‘All these chummy negotiations are over — here’s a list of what we want.’ And they looked at the list like we were from Mars.”

But for the most part, the only unconventional ideas that Romney managed to enact were those that he could ratify unilaterally. “He made significant consolidations in those agencies he directly oversaw, like housing, environment and transportation,” says Kerry Healey, his former lieutenant governor. “But higher education is buffeted with various boards and commissions, so we were reduced to working around the edges to achieve our goals. And something like making changes in the pension system, there would have needed to have been a lot of consensus built around it.” Romney’s failure to muster such a consensus had little to do with his party affiliation: other Republican governors in Massachusetts, like Frank Sargent and William Weld, long profited from excellent relations with their Democratic counterparts in the State Legislature. But what Sargent and Weld had that the Bain C.E.O. lacked was experience in forming political alliances and reaching compromises. “For better or for worse, he hadn’t been a creature of the Legislature, and neither was his lieutenant governor,” says Brad Jones, the minority leader. “Maybe that’s a good thing on the campaign trail, but it makes governing a challenge when you don’t have the relationships.”

Several of Romney’s initiatives, like higher-education reform — which would have entailed tuition hikes and severe budget cuts for some schools — were deeply unpopular. Building grass-roots support was not part of Romney’s world experience, and he made almost no effort to enlist the public in his crusade. “Obviously change is difficult, and for a governor or president, bringing about change is a very different art form from the private sector,” Michael Widmer, president of the conservative-leaning watchdog group Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, told me. “Romney put forward some very positive reforms. But as it turned out, he never really followed up on them in any meaningful way.” Instead of working with the Democrats on Beacon Hill, Romney decided to recruit a host of Republican challengers to unseat them in 2004. The tactic backfired. “He ended up losing three seats and a lot of good will in the bargain,” Widmer said.

Image Melanie’s Law, which toughened sentencing for repeat drunken drivers, was one of Romney’s early successes as governor in 2005. To his right is Nancy Powell, the mother of Melanie. Credit... Bill Greene/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Later in his term, the governor would show more adroitness at rallying the public to pressure lawmakers. In 2005 Romney introduced a bill that would become known as Melanie’s Law — named for Melanie Powell, a 13-year-old girl who was killed by a repeat-offense drunken driver — that imposed strict sentences on those who were convicted of drunken driving multiple times. When a few state representatives who were trial lawyers tried to dilute the bill, he responded with a barnstorming tour that shamed Democrats into restoring nearly all the original language, which Romney then signed into law in October. The next month, Romney successfully fought back against legislators seeking to pass a retroactive capital-gains tax, by inviting about a dozen nonwealthy citizens to a news conference to describe how the new tax bill would upend their lives. “Melanie’s Law and the capital-gains tax are perfect examples of how a governor can succeed,” the former Democratic House speaker Tom Finneran says. “I’ll give the governor credit for growth. I think he learned as he went along that being governor wasn’t like a Bain takeover of a troubled company.”