Historian Niall Ferguson devotes his latest Newsweek column to the benefits and drawbacks former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney faces as the most technocratic candidate running for the Republican presidential nomination.
A large part of the appeal of Mitt Romney as a presidential candidate is that he is the quintessential American Technocrat. His educational résumé couldn’t do more to convey managerial competence: the guy has degrees from both Harvard Law and Harvard Business schools. He has ticked every box the United States has to offer a compulsive doer, going forward with laserlike focus on win-win execution (this is how technocrats talk). He has built from scratch a successful private-equity business, Bain Capital. He has turned around a major public event, the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. He has been a state governor. I live in Massachusetts; not even his political opponents question Romney’s aptitude. And despite some recent bad press and months of attacks by his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, his campaign is running as smoothly as a McKinsey flow chart crossed with a BMW engine. …
… [P]eople can tolerate job losses, spending cuts, and tax hikes if they believe that a payoff will come in the foreseeable future. How to persuade them of that? The only way is through political leadership. And that means inspirational speeches and fireside chats.
Technocrats suck at these.
Ask yourself: what is Mitt Romney’s biggest weakness as a candidate (apart from his being a multimillionaire who pays an “effective” tax rate of 15 percent)? The answer is that he has all the rhetorical flair of a PowerPoint presentation. Despite years of practice and doubtless the best team of public-speaking coaches on the planet, he simply can’t stand in front of a lectern without turning into an immaculate wooden carving of himself emitting strange prerecorded messages from a human impersonator on Planet Vulcan. And if he’s bad with a script, he’s even worse off the cuff.