Romney and competence

David Brooks today (behind firewall) writes somewhat admiringly about Mitt Romney, but dwells on how fakey-fake Romney's campaign has been. He says Romney has a strong case to make that he's a competent executive, but he's pretty silly as a culture warrior. Unfortunately for Romney, says Brooks, the GOP primary voters prefer "creed" over competence. Writes Brooks:

Somehow the Romney campaign seems less like an authentic conservative campaign than an outsider’s view of what a conservative campaign should be. It oversimplifies everything, and underexploits the G.O.P.’s vestigial longing for efficient administration. I suspect the Romney campaign would do even better if it let the real Mitt Romney out to play.

Cal Thomas, the social conservative's social conservative, seems to agree. Excerpt:

Where are the voices of the presidential candidates promising to clean house of political appointees and replace them, not with political appointees from their party and persuasion, but with people who know what they are doing?

I care about social issues and the eroding morality of the country, but I care more about competent government. We are spending more on government than ever and getting less for our money. A government that can't keep track of nearly 200,000 weapons during a war does not inspire confidence. Let's have a little less ideology from the presidential candidates of both parties and a lot more talk of how to repair broken government.

This line from Thomas reminded me of a meeting I had over beer one bad Friday afternoon, the week of Katrina. I'd met a friend at a bar after my boss told me to take the afternoon off, given how upset I'd gotten over what happened in New Orleans earlier that week. Bush had by that time made his "heck of a job, Brownie" remark, and I'd been sitting at my desk all week watching the stranded people of New Orleans suffer while their state and national governments dithered. I was so overwhelmed by anger at bureaucratic incompetence, and infuriated by Bush's stupid refusal to hold his own employees accountable for their performance, that I remember telling my friend, a fellow conservative, that I would not vote for another Republican just because he shares my moral and social values -- that if he cannot run the damned government competently, he is not going to get my vote, even if he's more Catholic than the Pope. I've written off Romney as a phony, but if he would campaign as the competence candidate -- the infrastructure candidate, even -- and quit trying to pretend he's a social conservative, I'd give him a second look.