“…as president, you can get all kinds of advice from all kinds of people. But at the end of the day, when it comes time to make that decision, as president, all you have to guide you are your values, and your vision, and the life experiences that make you who you are. ”
Of all the moving and emotional components to Michelle Obama’s masterful speech last night, one piece stood out as a devastating critique of Mitt Romney – even if that wasn’t her intention. After a long recounting of Michelle’s and Barack’s real-life challenges in early adulthood, the First Lady connected their life narrative to her husband’s sense of values and vision for the country. This is a pretty standard rhetorical move, to be sure, but the way she captured it struck at the heart of Mitt Romney’s candidacy.
To a large extent, Mitt Romney has based his entire run on his ability to sift through data and make the sorts of tough business decisions that he made as CEO of Bain, and that we need from a President in a time of national crisis. The core of his candidacy is competence, or his ability to execute decisions with businesslike acuity.
But as even many conservative critics have pointed out – most clearly in the Economist – Mitt Romney’s political ambition does not seem to be guided by any set of underlying values or vision. After all, a business leader is driven by profit. To lead a nation requires the articulation of far more amorphous and unquantifiable objectives than does management of a corporate enterprise.
That point was driven home so eloquently by Michelle Obama in her description of just what Presidential decision-making actually entails. As she points out, the President gets bombarded by data and advisers, all of which require him to make judgment calls based on a deeper set of values. Those values may be negative ones, or crassly partisan, or they may be ideologically narrow. But they must be present somewhere at the core of the President’s persona to buttress his decision-making process. Without them, the President would be adrift and, presumably, so too would the nation he leads.
Romney had a chance to lay out a deeper vision for the country in Tampa. But he spent most of his time trying to show that he was a human being at all. Well, that’s certainly a start, I suppose. But it’s hardly enough. One thing we’ve learned is that the President must be driven by something beyond the vaguest platitudes and the simple desire to be President. Otherwise he is powerless in the face of competing interests and demands for his attention.
Ironically enough, Republicans used to dominate this sort of values-and-vision discussion. For decades the GOP ideology was clear as day and nearly every Republican could be counted on to advance the Reaganite coalition vision of strong defense, traditional culture and support for business. But in the wake of the Bush years those values have very different valences than they did as recently as 2004. The culture has shifted dramatically on issues like gay marriage, for example. National security priorities are completely different now in the post-Iraq era. And even on the basic Romneyite plain of free enterprise, there are major unanswered questions regarding the calibration of deficit reduction with low taxes. More than ever, the GOP needs somebody to articulate the party’s approach to these core issues facing the country. Instead, we’ve gotten a throwback to 1980 so strong you’d think George Brett was approaching .400 for the Kansas City Royals. That won’t cut it as a leader and, after the DNC, probably won’t suffice for a candidacy either.