Mitt Romney the Consultant

October 26, 2007

Mitt Romney has been a head scratcher for me. I cannot understand how someone who so clearly re-calibrates his message can be taken seriously by anyone. Various debates occur online as to the least dangerous Republican nominee.. and in these debates Romney scores points for his willingness to bend to popular opinion, but who can really know where he would actually stand?

The recent New Yorker article by Ryan Lizza sheds light on where Romney is coming from. It turns out that his work as a consultant is an important point to grasp. Before reading this I could not have explained what a consultant does, but it turns out a consultant is something like a business structure advisor. This is the person who walks into corporate headquarters and rearranges the corporate model in order to make things run more efficiently/cheaply.

At the end of his article Lizza makes a sharp observation:

In every Republican debate, he glows with the bright effervescence of a born salesman. But a political campaign may not be as susceptible to the strategies of management consulting as a business, where advising a corporation to reinvent itself is standard practice.

One can easily imagine a consultant advising a business to drop this or that emphasis and pushing a more marketable product. This kind of work appears to be ingrained in Romney. If one looks at his campaign in business terms.. i.e. as an attempt to rebrand himself for a new customer base.. then things start to make sense. Corporations that make the kind of about-face changes in advertising and product bother us hardly at all.. but the question is whether a politican can act like a corporation.

This consulting stuff adds a whole new layer of interest to Romney's campaign.. since it is another chapter in the corporatization of American politics. But it also adds for me a new level of revulsion. What must it be like to confuse your self with a corporation? My previous political posts have pointed out the way Barack Obama has received help constructing an identity.. but Romney needs no help: he does with his self exactly what he does with a corporation in need of capturing a target audience.