Do we want another self-anointed CEO president?

The Times has a good article about Mitt Romney's career at Bain, the prestigious investment bank. The article implicitly questions Romney's claims that his business experience makes him a good candidate for president. Romney's business was the business of equity maximization where he exhibited not the skills of a traditional businessman--budgeting and attentive management--but the skills of an investment banker--salesmanship and presentation. Private sector candidates have a tendency to sell themselves as embodying every quality of a sharp businessman, but there are sharp businessmen in different industries, and the skills of a candidate like Romney should not be sold as the skills of a Bill Gates or Andrew Carnegie. Whether Romney's investment bank skillset are the prime qualities we want in a president is a question worth asking, one that should preclude his being labelled a businessman in the traditional sense, especially when his career has made him accustomed to fighting for the corporate good (profits)--

But Mr. Romney’s Bain career — a source of money and contacts that he has used to finance his Massachusetts campaigns and to leap ahead of his presidential rivals in early fund-raising — also exposes him to criticism that he enriched himself excessively, sometimes by cutting jobs to increase profits.

He made his money mainly through leveraged buyouts — essentially, mortgaging companies to take them over in the hope of reselling them at big profits in just a few years. It is a bare-knuckle form of investing that is in the spotlight because of the exploding profits of buyout giants like Bain, Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. In Washington, Congress is considering ending a legal quirk that lets fund managers escape much of the income tax on their earnings.

--and not for the public good.