Noam Scheiber on Mitt Romney:
Romney's analytical style is hands-down his most compelling attribute. It's what made him successful as a management consultant and private-equity-fund manager. And it's what most distinguishes him from the man he'd like to succeed (though both hold MBAs from Harvard). But management consulting isn't the most obvious preparation for life on the campaign trail. Later, we show up at a diner in Derry where Rudy Giuliani stopped the day before. Romney can look less like a flesh-pressing candidate in these situations than like a video of a candidate that's being fast-forwarded. At one point, a hunter in an orange baseball cap asks about global warming. Romney doesn't so much answer the question as strafe him with bullet points: Nuclear powerclean coalefficient vehicles liquefied coalsolarwindethanol biodiesel. Romney is talking even faster now than during the Q&A setting, as if to compensate for the relative inefficiency of one-on-one campaigning.
On the way out, Romney sees the hunter again. "What were you hunting with today, a 20-gauge?" he asks. "No, I had a brand new, over-and-under 12-gauge," says the hunter. This is another Romney tic. When forced to make small talk, his habit is to guess at some trivial detail. It's of a piece with his general appetite for data. The problem is that it's constantly setting him up to be wrong, whereas Romney is a man who likes to be right. Later on, at a farm store, Romney asks the owner, "You've got about five thousand [square] feet here?" (right answer: 4,000) and whether an employee is her daughter (nope). At our final stop in Derry, Romney spots a man wearing a foreign-looking soccer jersey. "That's a Reebok shirt, isn't it?" "I don't know," says the man. Suddenly, Romney comes about as close to losing his cool as I've seen all day: "It is. It says Reebok right there." He's practically pleading as he points to the man's back: "You have a Reebok insignia right here."
