Franklin Roosevelt had his most industrious wife keeping him apprised of many things outside his daily experience. Also, the principles of management he favored made for messes but they did have the virtue of forcing information up the chain of command (because someone with authority had to clean up the mess).

Phillip C. Smith, Ph.D.

(1) Brian, in prep.

The whole Bain issue bores me.

The quotations you make use of from Walter Russell Mead do not say that. They refer to a specific bloc of five national elections each of which incorporated confounding variables of consequence. (Economic conditions, land war in the Near East, &c.)

For your students, just what is the value-added of your critical assessments of their work?

Yet the Romneys did not have a nanny to raise their five boys. Ann Romney did that herself, and taught the boys to clean up after themselves. When they were a young married couple at Brigham Young University, they lived in a small apartment. When they went on family vacations, they packed their five boys into a station wagon and Mitt drove for hours. They didn’t take a jet. They have five families full of grandchildren, and they attend church with ordinary Mormons wherever they are on Sundays. In Boston, the Mormons they went to church with included Haitian immigrants and Cambodian refugees. Because of his unpaid leadership, he spent many hours each week focused on the.individual financial and spiritual needs of his Mormon neighbors. Mr Obama has never done anything so unselfish. The reporters who don’t report this are concealing Romney from the public.

The Obama effort to tie great wealth to aloofness is ironic, given the large personal income of so many of Obama’s supporters who work in the news and entertainment industries. Barbara Walters criticized Romney for being wealthy and allegedly out of touch, when she is almost as rich as he is, with income of $14 million per year.

You have to be totally clueless about money if you think Bain Capital bought a steel company, invested $100 million in it, and held it for eight years just for the fun of taking it into bankruptcy, which does not make them, the equity owners, any money.

The real vulture capitalist is Obama, who froze out General Motors’ creditors so he could give the company to the United Auto Workers union. Would you loan GM money, now or in the future, knowing that your investment might be arbitrarily stolen by the president without compensation to you?