A CEO for the USA? On the trail with Manager Mitt.

MITT ROMNEY tells the audience at a town-hall meeting here how his kids got him a 1962 Rambler--the American Motors car produced by his dad George Romney--for his 60th birthday. It seems just a charming story to warm up the crowd. Romney says, "We got it started, drove it up the road--and then pushed it home." People laugh. But Romney is really telling a parable about his favorite theme: change.

He says his 1962 car had no arm rest, no seatbelts, no bucket seats, and a great big steering wheel that it took a lot of muscle to turn. "Cars have changed a lot," he says. And then he launches into his real point: "People selling us goods and services figure out they got to make them better every year." The people who run government feel no similar obligation, especially in Washington where "talk is the currency." Romney says "talk has no value--not in the real world," and that he "grew up in the real world."

This is the core message of Romney's campaign, and it is a credible one that accords with his background and interests. He's a businessman populist running as a Washington outsider, although without the nasty edge or fiery rhetoric of past populist anti-Washington candidates (think Gephardt circa 1988, Perot circa 1992, or Buchanan circa whenever). Romney is technocratic and non-threatening, giving the impression that he will slay the slouching beast of ineffective, wasteful government with flow-charts and unremitting politeness.

It is impossible to be around Romney and not be impressed--by his obvious intelligence, by his fluid speaking style, by his accomplishments in business and government, by his appearance. The former venture capitalist and Massachusetts governor is a technically proficient candidate, a good fundraiser and organizer who makes a winning impression on the stump. And yet, one still wonders whether voters will buy him.

He's got a Boy Scout demeanor, but he has been under withering assault as a political fraud all year long. He "looks like a president," as people always say of him, but his perfect appearance may feed the sense that he's a synthetic candidate. His Mormon faith clearly played a role in his success in life, but it could be an obstacle to winning voters even as he campaigns on his successes.

So Romney remains a question mark, although as talented and highly presentable a question mark as you'll ever find.

Prior to his Derry meeting, Romney visits a small manufacturing firm in Manchester, Granite State Manufacturing. He gets a politician's typical speed tour, getting briefed on the company's products ranging from semi-conductors to the small robots the military uses against bomb threats. Then he is brought out onto the shop floor to deliver remarks to the couple of dozen gathered employees from behind a podium.

Romney seems an incongruous presence, crisp and well pressed, in this industrial setting, with a concrete floor and buzzing lights overhead. He says that he was wondering about what united the company's different products, and his guide explained the company is good at "things that are changing a lot." That, of course, sets up Romney nicely, and he gives a kind of mini-business tutorial. It is possible to imagine him fitting in here, after all--as a business consultant.

He explains that if you're making the same product or delivering the same service over an extended period, "you're in trouble." To illustrate that improvement is always possible, he says when Hank Paulson left Goldman Sachs for the Treasury Department, everyone assumed the firm couldn't possibly be run any more effectively, but "the new chief executive changed everything and now it's doing better." Then--of course--he complains that government doesn't change enough, and tells the workers that, in the private sector, "I learned to change things."

Romney doesn't have a highly ideological message on the stump. He is running as a mild limited-government conservative. He says over and over again that to make America better "you don't strengthen government, you strengthen the American people." He plumps for lower taxes (he wants to cut taxes on saving and investment), advocates keeping federal spending below the level of inflation, and notes that he liked to veto bills in Massachusetts. None of this is hard to believe of Romney. It's on social and cultural issues--where he has shifted to the right in recent years--that he has developed a credibility problem.

On this swing through New Hampshire, he doesn't go out of his way to mention any of those issues. He instead gets at them obliquely through his personal life.

At every stop, he lauds New Hampshire voters for the intensive nature of their primary, during which they take the time to learn "about the character of those running." He urges them to "measure us for our character and heart and passion and values." Implicit message: A certain frontrunning former New York City mayor would never, could never, say the same.

At his town-hall meeting, he talks about the importance of marriage. "Kids deserve a mom and a dad," he says, and "where we can, let's encourage marriage before children." By way of illustrating the de-valuing of marriage, he tells of an aide going to Babies "R" Us with his pregnant wife and getting asked by a salesperson, "What's your girlfriend's name?" There are a few gasps in the audience.

This might seem a tame volley in the culture wars, but few other major politicians talk about the culture of marriage at all, and Romney's upstanding personal life allows him to do it without embarrassment. In his 2000 primary campaign, George W. Bush got a lot of mileage out of his evangelical faith that allowed him to signal to social conservatives that he shared their values. Romney's devotion to family could serve a similar function this year.

On this day, he's campaigning with his oldest son Tagg and Tagg's daughter. Before introducing him at the Granite State Manufacturing event, Romney explains that he "fell in love in high school," and married his high-school sweetheart, Ann. Tagg was "born on our anniversary, one year after we got married"--one of those perfect touches in what seems a perfect family life. He says that Tagg's daughter is taking the day off from school. But could a Romney ever play hooky? "She's seeing how the political process works and then writing a paper on it for Monday." She'll probably get an "A."

Years ago, a pollster asked people which presidential candidate they would rather have baby-sit their child. Forget baby-sit--most people would probably be comfortable having Mitt Romney raise their children.

Romney exudes good-natured earnestness. He has the jaw-line of Dudley Do Right and the resolute friendliness of Ned Flanders. "Gosh, I'm making some progress," he tells reporters, touting his poll numbers in early states. He says "you guys" a lot--"Hey, you guys," "Thanks, you guys"--and you can imagine that being said by a clean-cut 1950s teenager inviting his friends out for a Friday-night malt at the local burger place. Romney is like the character from the movie Blast from the Past who lives for decades in a fallout shelter, emerging with his 1950s values intact in contemporary America.

He has a quick sense of humor to go along with his cheerfulness. When he mentions the Rambler, a few people clap, and he quips, "A couple of guys had Ramblers--but they're not the ones clapping." At Granite State Manufacturing, he manipulates a bomb-squad robot using a joystick on a table. He points it mock-menacingly toward a reporter: "Let's see, I'll go for the AP today." When an official at a charity he visits jokingly says to the assembled cameras that he himself is getting into the presidential race, Romney interjects from the sidelines, "Not another one!"

So what's not to like? There is sometimes a sense that, as profile writers have put it, Romney is "too good to be true." A colleague of mine maintains that Hollywood would never cast Mitt Romney as a president--he just looks too implausibly good for the role. So the cliche that he looks like a president "out of Central Casting" doesn't work for Romney. He's better-looking than that. When he says at the town-hall meeting here that he is 60 years old, I'm taken aback. I must have known he was roughly that old, but looking at him while he says it, it's hard to believe. (At one event a reporter asks skeptically about his tan--Romney explains he sunned himself at a Florida meeting of the Club for Growth.)

Through no fault of his own, Romney's perfect presentation can be a little grating. You want to muss his gelled hair. Would it even be possible? Or see some creases in his suit. Or at least hear him stumble over a word.

On a deeper level, successful presidential candidates usually have a narrative arc--often involving some personal struggle--that connects with a deeper message. With Clinton, it was the "Man from Hope," emerging from a humble background to bring a sense of renewal to America. With George W. Bush, it was righting himself after his trouble with alcohol, giving a personal resonance to his pledge to create a Responsibility Era. With the near-miss campaign of John McCain in 2000, it was his time as a POW, buttressing his calls for patriotic sacrifice.

It would be foolish to say that Romney has had no personal struggles--for one, his wife was diagnosed with MS a few years ago--but they play no prominent role in his political persona. His narrative arc is that he ran private companies and turned around the 2002 Winter Olympics, made hundreds of millions of dollars, and now is here offering himself to run the federal government.

He risks seeming as though he's campaigning to be a glorified director of the Office of Management and Budget. He says providing a good home is important for children, "who will develop the technology of the future." Only a former venture capitalist would see children as budding profit centers. In response to a foreign-policy question, he notes the importance of moderate Muslim states and says he wants a "health-care initiative that brings to those countries some of the innovation we have." Will, say, paperless record-keeping really be a key to the ideological struggle with radical Islam?

The question is whether at this moment, in the midst of a war, Republican voters will want to turn to a nice-seeming technocrat. Romney says all the right things about fighting the "jihadists," but every time he says the word it sounds tinny to my ear--as though he learned it only recently. He talks tough about the Iranian nuclear program and supports the Iraq War, although with a cautious tone. He says "the troop surge is the proper course," although he can't say "it's a high-confidence course." We'll know if it's working "in a matter of months, not years."

Then there are the flip-flops, which have bedeviled Romney all year (yes, change can go too far). Reporters ask about them at a brief press availability, but not too energetically. How many times can you ask the same question? After spending time with Romney, I think that the flip-flop charge might fade, because ten months from now--in the age of the constant news-cycle--it will seem very old news. But the next day Romney gets embroiled in another authenticity flap, this time over whether he's really a "lifelong hunter" or not.

On this trip, Romney is campaigning on the high of having outpaced the other Republican candidates by raising $23 million. The big number ensured he would stay in the first tier of candidates. As a Romney aide explains, with anticipated candidates Sens. George Allen and Bill Frist never getting in the race, the press put Romney in the top tier without his really having to earn it. Now, he's earned it. The bad news is that a mainstream-conservative vacuum had opened up in the field with Allen's and Frist's absence that Romney could have filled, but the flip-flopping charges kept him from doing it. Now, that vacuum might be occupied by former senator Fred Thompson.

Thompson's entry would make Romney's task much harder, since he needs as many conservative votes as he can get. But he still will have his unique appeal. "The government of the United States is one of the largest enterprises in the world," he says, yet some candidates "have never run a corner store." Romney has run much more than that, and he's going to be sure voters know it.

RICHARD LOWRY

Derry, N.H.