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Mitt Romney loves data and lusts after process.

In a recent cover profile in the Weekly Standard by the magazine's Fred Barnes, Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO-in-chief of America. Says Barnes quoting Romney, a Harvard MBA: "His idea of the perfect deal is not when one side wins but when 'you find a new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go. That doesn't always happen.'"

Indeed.

Barnes says Romney's "approach to government is not ideological." A Romney adviser is quoted as saying of his candidate: "He's super-pragmatic. He's an eclectic conservative." And Romney himself says flatly that as president he would "insist on gathering data...and analyze the data looking for trends."

Uh-oh.

Make no mistake. If the leading candidates in the GOP presidential race are to be litmus tested as conservatives, all would cause conservatives sleepless nights. If the Reagan coalition was of economic and social conservatives combined with national security hawks, each group has something to be disturbed about with this batch of front-runners. Giuliani famously has his issues with social issues, McCain his prickly insistence on First Amendment censorship and an addiction to sounding like Al Gore on global warming and Hillary Clinton on immigration. Huckabee amazingly sounds like Ted Kennedy in his attack on supporters of economic growth as greedy, while Thompson was not only assisting the pro-choice movement as a lawyer, but has an apparent bent for trial lawyers.

Yet the Romney approach as described not only by Barnes but more importantly by Romney himself is an approach that goes far beyond any particular issue. It is, as Romney himself freely admits, all about process. Whatever the issue -- economic, social or national security -- Romney would gather the data, look for a trend and thus "you make better decisions."

This should cause conservatives to break out in cold sweats.

LET'S TAKE ROMNEY BACK to two of the most important Republican presidencies in the history of America. Let's make him a ghostly observer as the presidents in question deal with "the data" being presented to them by their advisers.

Romney's first visit would be to the Lincoln White House in 1864. There was no Oval Office in 1864 so Romney finds Old Abe in his office upstairs on the second floor of the residence. Lincoln has just been handed a memo by his Secretary of War, and the data looks pretty grim

Lincoln is staring at a sheet filled with numbers. The numbers are of Union casualties in the ten 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 thirteen thousand Union casualties at the battle of Shiloh, sixteen thousand at Second Manassas, twelve thousand at Antietam and yet again at Stone River, seventeen thousand at Chancellorsville, twenty-three thousand at Gettysburg. And so on in one battle after another stretching over the past three years.

So as our ghostly Romney studies this "data" -- now what? The conservative fear, of course, is that the "super pragmatic" 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 Romney would be whispering to Lincoln that the data speaks for itself. Passion should yield to process. And that would be that, if Romney carried the day as Lincoln's adviser.

Move 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 Romney's home state of Michigan, the state where Romney's father was a star of the Republican liberal movement, is staring at reams of data. The results, as Stockman would write shortly after his angry departure from the Reagan White House, were -- from 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." Stockman -- both in real time and in his bitter memoirs published in 1986 -- was nothing if not a fountain of data. And that data's conclusion, insisted 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 Stockman would have agreed with...Stockman.

If decisions were all about data, then the McClellan/Stockman view of the world -- a worldview that is apparently Romney's as well -- would be the triumphs most celebrated in American history. Lincoln and Reagan would be rated not at the top of the presidential greatness scale but somewhere well down towards the bottom.

topics:
Taxes, Hillary Clinton, Business, Religion, Abortion, Law, Military, Immigration