No one ever regretted hiring Romney to do a job

Romney is a fundamentally decent man who has been true to his family and his faith. He’s even-tempered to a fault and personally polite (if politically ruthless). But he won’t win the “Would you want to have a beer with him?” contest with Obama, and not even the “Would you want to have a chocolate milk with him?” contest. Kids will never faint at his rallies, and journalists will never fall over themselves praising his eloquence. The country will always be blissfully free of “Mitt-mania.”…

No chiliastic expectations will attach to Romney. No one will expect him to turn back the tides. That’s just as well. The messianic model of the 2008 Obama campaign is un-republican and must, by its very nature, disappoint. Romney’s promise is more pedestrian, if less juvenile: to comb through the federal books. When Barack Obama made the same pledge during his first campaign, it was laughably insincere. One imagines Romney literally doing it, at all hours and with relish.

For all Romney’s flaws, there are worse men to make president at a time when the federal government needs to be transformed and the economy made more efficient. In 2008, Obama asked the nation to do itself the favor of allowing him to bestow on it all his history-making grandeur. In 2012, if he gets the chance, Romney should ask the nation something much more basic: “Hire me.”