The Romney Economy ( Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New York Magazine)

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At Bain Capital, Romney remade one American business after another, overhauling management and directing vast sums of money to the top of the labor pyramid. The results made him a fortune. They also changed the world we live in.

One day early this August, Mitt Romney gripped a microphone at the Iowa State Fair, faced a crowd of a few hundred people, and began, a little joylessly and therefore a little rapidly, to give a speech. It is the opinion of some of Romney’s friends, some of the men with whom he made his fortune, that the repetitive business of campaigning simply bores him and that this boredom is responsible for the fairly sizable gap between the charismatic man they know in private and the battery-powered figure who often appears in public.

Romney, of course, is not the only person bored by Romney’s campaign appearances, and in the glazed reaction of the crowds you can see some skepticism about whether a candidacy predicated on bringing a businesslike efficiency to the WhiteHouse—a candidacy, basically, of process—could be something to rally around. “Over the coming decades,” Romney said at the fair, barely pausing between each idea, “to balance our budget and not spend more than we take in, we have to make sure that the promises we make in Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare are promises we can keep. And there are various ways of doing that. One is we could raise taxes on people …”

“Corporations!” a man cried out from the midst of the crowd. Romney was halfway through his next sentence, but he stopped and pivoted, noticing the hecklers, one of whom (it turned out) was a 71-year-old former Catholic priest from Des Moines. Morality incarnate. “Corporations!” a heckler cried again.

Romney grinned. “Corporations are people, my friend,” he said, neatly, flatly, and looked back to the crowd, eager to press on. Suddenly there were loud objections coming from all over, catcalls and cries of disbelief. But the cameras detected a splash of interest on Romney’s face.

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1. Oh, duh: link

http://nymag.com/news/politics/mitt-romney-2011-10/