Reading Romney's mind: if the former Massachusetts governor wins the white house, who would make up his economic brain trust?

• Author: Barnes, Fred
• Position: Mitt Romney

For one who's been active in politics for two decades, Mitt Romney has an unusual way of thinking. He's a man with no ideology, none at all. He practiced at Bain Capital what he learned at Harvard Business School and now applies it, to the extent he can, to polities and policy. It's coolly analytical, with lots of data and numbers, and leads to crisp, unambiguous decisions, case by ease--but only after hours of debate. "I have to see conflict," he told me during his first race for president in 2008. "The last thing you want is people coming in saying, 'We all agree.'" Here's how Romney describes the process, from start to finish:

You diagnose the problem. You put the fight team together to solve the problem. You listen to alternative viewpoints. You insist on gathering data before you make decisions and analyze the data looking for trends. The result of this process is, you hope, that you make better decisions. You typically also have processes in place to see if it's working or not working, and you make adjustments from time to time. That's the Romney ideal for decision-making. It's the Bain way, orderly and business-like, and it sounds great. It would rid polities of irrationality, messiness, and unnecessary mishaps. Partisanship, bowing to interest groups and campaign donors, issue bias, patronage, yielding to personal ambition--all that is gone in Ronmey's vision of how a president should address everything-issues, problems, personnel.

Except politics doesn't work quite that way. And while Ronmey clings to the exacting Bain approach, he's adjusted. In politics, "You end up taking into consideration things that wouldn't be important in business decision," he acknowledged in 2009, according to a Harvard Business School classmate quoted by Jodi Kantor of the New York Times.

So it's anything but a purely analytical way of thinking that, if elected president in November, he'll bring to Washington. It's half Bain, half political. This approach, unique to Romney, is what he'll rely on in selecting an economic team: Treasury secretary, the head of the National Economic Council at the White House, and perhaps a new chairman of the Federal Reserve. It's a given he'll have to satisfy the factions of the Republican party with his appointments, most of all the conservatives. But there are many more considerations.

His wife Ann is one. She's constantly at his side, though Romney aides insist she doesn't advise him on politics. "I've never seen her do that," an aide told me. Her role is to "take him out of the campaign," to provide relief from politics, nothing more.

Yet when asked in July if her husband might choose a female running mate, she said: "We've been looking at that and I love the option." Notice it was "we" and not "he" who were doing the looking...