It’s Competence, Stupid!
Author Archive Send to a Friend Print Version August 1, 2007 5:00 AM It's Competence, Stupid! Managerial excellence, not ideological purity, is what the GOP primary is all about. By Jim Geraghty N ew York Times columnist David Brooks was wowed by Mitt Romney Friday, offering a rave review of the candidate "talking about his success in business and in running the Olympics. He was talking about how you assemble a team of people with complimentary skills. How you use data and analysis to replace opinion. How you set benchmarks and how often you should perform self-evaluation… It opened up a vista of how government might operate." This brought an unimpressed reaction from a closeted conservative editor at a Washington publication, who thought he heard an echo of another former governor of Massachusetts: Now, come on. Doesn't that sound, more than anything, like a Republican version of Mike Dukakis? "I can make government work. It's not about ...