Nicholas Lemann, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, has done a fantastic, magical thing: He has made me read twelve pages about Mitt Romney, who, until I read his article in the New Yorker , I thought to be one of the world's most uninteresting men.
It's not that Lemann has managed to make this Romney actually interesting in his own right, but Lemann shows him as a product of his environment, which includes his family, his Mormonism, the places he was gestated--Harvard Business and Law school, and the times in which that happened, times during which the economy of this country was profoundly restructured from an economy in which companies produced things, to an economy in which companies generated profits from restructuring companies, increasing efficiencies ruthlessly.
And ruthless is the operational word here. It is keeping focused on what you are supposed to be doing, on how to score points, to win the game, not on the beauty of the game, not on making a good play or a good automobile, but on one thing, winning.
In my mind, this had made Romney seem soulless. But that's a bit too simple, you can understand when you hear especially the Mormon friends of Romney talk about the importance of succeeding in business as almost a spiritual enterprise.
These men, Clayton Christensen,the Harvard Business School professor , Kim Clark, the president of BYU-Idaho, Henry Eyring, the second ranking Mormon church official, all speak with fervor about the role of mastering business as a way of protecting the Mormons from persecution, as a way of achieving leadership in a society which has once persecuted the faith.
What emerges in this astonishingly even handed portrait of Romney, is not a horned monster, but a very predictable product of a certain system and time.
And Romney is far, far more conservative than I would ever have thought. He is no Rockefeller. He is something else entirely.
Oddly, he is very much the embodiment of what Henry Ford describes as the typical Jew in Ford's The International Jew, a man who wants to seize the financial mechanism of a business with little care about the engineering aspect of the business. Ford complained the Jew does not want to work with his own hands on the product, the automobile; he is only interested in working in the financial department. This is exactly the attitude of the men at Bain capital, who are transaction men, who pride themselves on seeing where inefficiencies exist in the flow of capital into the company, on how it's accounting is done, on how it borrows and spends money.
Romney and Bain were part of the transformation of the American corporation, in what Michael Jensen of Harvard called the third industrial revolution, which changed the nature of American companies from organizations whose purpose was to produce things to produce a profit, to organizations whose primary purpose was to produce a profit, whether or not that happened by producing things or by simply being dismantled and sold for spare parts.
Of course, as companies were pulled apart by men like Mitt Romney, peoples lives were damaged as jobs were lost, but Romney could not allow himself to be concerned about this any more than a shark can concern itself with the effect of his teeth on the body of the seal. The shark does what it does; the seal is sacrificed. The world is not a Walt Disney movie with lovable Bambi. In the end, Romney might argue, the ocean is better off with fewer seals and more sharks, but in any event, as the shark, he plays the game to win for the sharks.
Interesting details: A very common pattern for young rising Mormon men is to go to a college for a year, often Stanford. Then leave to go on your mission knocking on doors in France or Africa. Then return to Brigham Young University, and finish your college education, and often to marry before you leave. Then off to Harvard Business School, or sometimes both Harvard Business School and Harvard Law. All of which Romney did.
The idea is if you do Business, you learn to lead, and you bring money and power back to the church, to which you tithe, but then the higher calling is politics, with which Law School may help, and politics offers the ultimate opportunity to protect the children who have wandered in the wilderness, despised and attacked, threatened and abused.
Romney's father was born in Mexico because a colony of American Mormons had moved there to be able to continue polygamy. One of Romney's good friends, Henry Eyring, is related to Romney because Eyring's great grandfather was married to two Romney sisters. Mitt Romney home schooled the seven children of the Mormon dean of Harvard Business School, when they all lived in Belmont, Massachusetts.
Mad Dog finds all of this illuminating and surprising. Most of the Mormons among Mad Dog's extended family are Jack Mormons, and even those who lived within the bosom of the Church, did so with a wink and a lot of accommodation to wider American culture. Mad Dog knew devout Mormons in college and later, but the whole home schooling, business as a vehicle to protect the group against the threat from the greater American culture which wishes to destroy you, that is all a surprise.
Of course, the idea of playing the game to win is by no means peculiar to Mormons. You have only to go through any "elite" university to meet lots of people who do not want to to know anything about Shakespeare which will not be on the test, people who have no feeling for any subject beyond how to get a "A" in the course. These are the winning-is-the-only-thing people. For these people Thoreau was an "A" paper and American slavery was just an hourly exam subject.
Personally, Mad Dog has never been a winner. Mad Dog can stand out in center field and not know what the score is. If he made a good catch, or if he got a hit, or if he hit the cut off man, or if a teammate hit a home run, it was a great game. Who knows, who cares who won?
But for the men at Bain, the only thing that matters is the score at the end.
Oddly, for a man who prides himself on analyzing numbers, Romney was stupefyingly obtuse, saying that the 47% of Americans who do not pay income taxes are parasites who consider themselves victims, who expect the government to take care of them, when 90% of Americans pay either payroll taxes or Medicare or Social Security taxes and about 90% of Americans benefit from one Federal government program or another.
As Lemann notes, "You'd expect somebody who proposes to run the federal government to know that."
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