If Mitt Romney is likely to win the Republican presidential nomination, his qualifications for the Oval Office demand scrutiny. Megan McArdle examines one aspect of the Romney resume in a new Atlantic feature: his business career.

McArdle takes aim at Romney’s long career as a management consultant:

[C]onsider what a consultant does. Consultants are, as any firm will tell you, the “best and the brightest,” culled from elite undergraduate and graduate programs. But they rarely lead anything larger than a small team; the average Army second lieutenant nine months out of a third-tier state college probably has more direct reports, and more deliverables.

Moreover, a consultant’s voice is not the voice of direct experience; most of the problems that consultants analyze are ones they have never faced. And although consultants asking for your business may talk about the trove of industry intelligence they have to share, in practice, the sharing is limited: contracts forbid sharing anything really juicy, and some firms work with only one client per sector at a time. In fact, the arguments for hiring a consultant are often the same as those for seeing a psychiatrist. Both experts have helped an awful lot of people work through prob¬lems, which makes them good at listening and gives each one an arsenal of best practices to suggest to their new clients. …

… The skills of a top-flight consultant are undoubtedly an asset on the campaign trail, where the main job is to describe problems and possible solutions in the most attractive way. Mitt Romney is arguably doing this for the GOP: mirroring its concerns back to it in a way that may help it move on from the political box it’s trapped in. “Just say no!” is an insufficient governing philosophy for the next four years, especially because many of the bolder Republican proposals frighten voters; by repackaging Republican priorities into something with broader appeal, Romney may help the party transform itself into a party that can govern.

But the tendency of consultants to have a “hugely presentational style of management” also has a downside, argues Stewart: “They think they’ve basically done the job when they deliver a PowerPoint.”

Moreover, when consultants are accountable for results, they don’t necessarily shine.