Unmanageable.

In the cover piece of April 30 ("A CEO for the USA?"), Richard Lowry calls Mitt Romney a proficient manager and CEO. That is precisely what worries informed conservatives. Management expertise is not what America needs from a president, particularly in a time of moral and social crisis and of sweeping cultural change. Management is what a good professional staff is supposed to provide; leadership is something else entirely, and we would not want to conflate management with the higher virtue of leadership. America needs leadership based on an inflexibly constitutionalist and minimum-government worldview.

Throughout his political career, Romney has valued mere management over the substance of what he has managed. His chief contribution as governor of Massachusetts was his bungling of the gay-marriage issue. Professor of jurisprudence Hadley Arkes was quite correct when he described on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE how Romney managed the crisis as a weak-kneed political pragmatist.

The facts are not seriously disputed: Romney ignored emphatic legal advice from numerous authoritative sources that he was constitutionally obliged to ignore the Goodridge decision, which neither sought nor anticipated any action whatever from the executive branch unless the legislature first acted to legalize homosexual marriage--the sole avenue to legalization that the state constitution allows. Romney wrongly claimed that the state supreme court had itself changed the law, thus imputing power to Massachusetts judges that the state constitution explicitly denies them--a power the Massachusetts courts have repeatedly admitted they do not have.

Romney is unrecognizable as a conservative, as a constitutionalist, or as anything but a managerialist.

John Haskins

Parents' Rights Coalition

Waltham, Mass.

et alia