Jeffrey Lord writing in the Opinion Journal is critical of Romney because of his resort to data and process. Strong presidents have succeeded because of their commitment to principle often in the face of data that challenges their stand.

excerpts from www.OpinionJournal.com :
That Does Not Compute
Mitt Romney has a passion for data. A great president needs a passion for principle.
BY JEFFREY LORD
Wednesday, December 12, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Lincoln is staring at a sheet filled with numbers. The numbers are of Union casualties in the 10 most casualty-filled battles of the Civil War thus far. The banality of ink-on-paper belies the horrific human impact behind the figures. Over 13,000 Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh, 16,000 at Second Manassas, 12,000 at Antietam and yet again at Stone River, 17,000 at Chancellorsville, 23,000 at Gettysburg. And so on in one battle after another stretching over the past three years.

So as our ghostly Mr. Romney studies these “data”–now what? The conservative fear, of course, is that the “superpragmatic” Mr. Romney who places such faith in the process of data and trends would say to Lincoln exactly what the Democratic nominee of 1864, a battlefield general of the war, was saying in his campaign against Lincoln. The war is a “failure,” said George McClellan. Stop it–right now. The numbers, the kind of data so prized by a possibly future President Romney, are unmistakably ghastly. Union kids and Confederate kids–Americans all–are being slaughtered on a scale that dwarfs the imagination.

But what of principle here? What of the passion for the principle–and passion plays no small role in Lincoln’s adherence to principle–that no man, woman or child should be a slave in America? What about the fundamental principle of human freedom? What about keeping the Union together? The startling thought occurs that Mr. Romney would be whispering to Lincoln that the data speak for themselves. Passion should yield to process. And that would be that, if Mr. Romney carried the day as Lincoln’s adviser.

Move Mr. Romney back to the future, or at least the relatively recent past. This time his ghost is hovering over Ronald Reagan’s shoulder. President Reagan is one happy guy. His tax and budget cuts have passed, and he signed them into law. The Reagan revolution has begun. But it’s now 1985, and there’s a problem. David Stockman, Reagan’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, a former congressman from Mr. Romney’s native Michigan, the state where Romney’s father was a star of the Republican liberal movement, is staring at reams of data. The results, as Mr. Stockman would write shortly after his angry departure from the Reagan White House, were–from Mr. Stockman’s view–“frightening.” The very idea that Reagan would stick with his tax cuts was a sign the president was in “dreamland.” He was campaigning for re-election in 1984 on “false promises.” Mr. Stockman–both in real time and in his bitter memoirs published in 1986–was nothing if not a fountain of data. And the data’s conclusion, insisted Mr. Stockman, was that the Reagan revolution was a “failure.” Reagan should abandon his passion for the principle of low taxes and cutting federal spending while restoring the military. Presumably, the Romney ghost sitting in the room with Reagan and Mr. Stockman would have agreed with . . . Mr. Stockman.

They are, of course, not viewed that way at all. The principles of Lincoln and Reagan carried the day precisely because each man was able to stare at the “data”–however gruesome or frightening they might be–and not blink. They are seen as great presidents and great leaders today because they understood at a visceral level that they should hold fast, refuse to yield to overwhelming demands from critics that they follow the data or that they adhere to a process that used something other than casualties or deficit projections as a measuring stick. Lincoln would not cave in on the principles of holding the Union together and the most basic principle of America–freedom. Reagan would not yield on the central conservative principle that tax cuts and less government spending were in fact the keys to America’s future economic vitality.

Yet Mr. Romney did not need a visit to the Bush Library to understand why the Library does not contain the papers of a two-term president. The reason, of course, is that then-Vice President George H.W. Bush campaigned for the presidency in 1988 on the principle he phrased as “read my lips–no new taxes.” He won. Yet in the name of precisely the process Mr. Romney lovingly describes–gathering data and looking for trends–the first President Bush was persuaded by Romneyesque advisers like then-Treasury aide Richard Darman to surrender bedrock conservative principle and raise taxes. The senior Mr. Bush was advised to choose data and process over principle. He did–and in short order had lots of time on his hands to decide the process for building a library about a one-term president while Bill and Hillary Clinton took charge.

But if conservatives have learned anything since 1964 it is this: principles count. A principle presidency always trumps a process presidency. Lincoln did better than Hoover, Reagan did better than Bush I or Carter. Better heading in the right direction with a faulty process than zipping along in the wrong direction simply because the process and the data are telling you things are wonderfully efficient. A train making exceptional time to Boston is useless if in fact you wanted to go to Miami.

for the complete article http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110010979

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