Why I Couldn't Vote for Romney Even if I wasn't a Liberal Partisan Hack (which I am)

I actually think that Romney is a good manager.  I think there is truth to the conservative narrative that Romney is the guy you want at the head of the board room table.  I think this is compatible with the gafftastic nature of the romney compaign; the CEO of a company doesn't usually have to put up with public scrutiny; they have to put up with private scrutiny (and, thus, have to be able to hash out pragmatic solutions to real problems and set all the bullshit aside) and they have to make public appearances.  But those two never don't usually intersect.  The CEO's public, chiseled, meticulous image doesn't usually face the threat of being ruffled by an overly curious public.  When they have the liberty to drop the facade and get down to brass tacks, and stop worrying about press or bloggers, they can be very effective.  I bet Romney would be very effective in this way.

The thing is:  CEO's don't need to make agendas in the same ways that presidents do.  they don't have to prioritize from scratch.  Because the CEO's agenda, the ultimate priority, is quite obvious:  make more money and don't lose money.

But for a nation, success is not so well defined.  One of the reasons that bipartisanship is so rare, and so unsatisfying when it actually happens, is because the sides don't agree on what it is for the country to be doing well, to be on the right tack.  So Romney might be very effective in getting-it-done, but without any antecedent understanding of what "it" is, a president has to make a substantive stand on what kind of success they are aiming at, knowing that that very result will not be acknowledged as a version of "success" by the other side.  The president has to know not only how we get to where they want to go, they have to establish where we want to go.

I'm not deluded into thinking that Obama is some ideological purist who "stands on the strength of his convictions", but I think he gets his sense of what it is for the country to be succeeding from a pretty traditional, democratic, left-of-center ideology, along with a somewhat right-of-center approach to America's international presence.  Use government as a way of correcting for the subtly coercive and oppressive maneuvers that unfettered capitalism invites people to exploit for their own gain.  that's the goal.  Be on the lookout for where capitalists have found a way to maximize their profits by robbing the less well off of any statistically reasonable chance at a minimum quality of life, and flex legislative muscles to make the capitalists cut it  the fuck out.  That's my understanding of left-of-center ideology, and I think that's by-and-large the perspective from which Obama approaches policy making.

Where does Romney take his cues from with regard to criteria for success?  He appears to be a bit of a sponge in this regard.  Make your demands of him, and he'll tout your ends as criteria for success.  That may not even be bad, except it's clear enough whose demands are the most audible in the oval office.  They're the demands of huge monied interests.  So I have no doubt that Romney would succeed at managing the executive branch as a machine built to accomplish some x, but I think we have ample reason to believe that Romney himself will be indifferent as to what the x is, and is likely to listen to fringe interests groups in his party's caucus, in the hopes that those interests can get him re-elected.  And this isn't idle speculation.  I think this is the best guess we can make given his apparent fickleness during the primaries.  As different voices got louder and quieter, Romney vacillated on which goals he trumpeted most loudly.

We all know how active and aggressive special interests are in Washington.  I feel pretty confident that the USFG would be as capable in achieving its goals under Romney as it would under any president.  I really do think that, I think.  My concern comes in how those goals will be decided upon, and I think we'd be foolish to take anything said in this campaign as an unbreakable promise.  I think that the most rational guess, given all we know, is that massive monied and corporate interests would successfully ensure that the agenda of a Romney executive branch would be their agenda.  And given how effective Romney would be at accomplishing his goals...