What Romney should say

Part of being in a leadership position in any organization is staring into a crystal ball and attempting to predict the future. We all do this, every day. That strategy will work; that one won’t. If you have an agenda, you tend to cast predictions based on your pet philosophy – and let’s be honest, most of us aren’t objective enough to look beyond whatever prejudices we have and admit that what the other guy is suggesting just might work.

That’s particularly an issue for anyone running for office, because most of them are bound (even nominally) by the positions their particular party holds. One reason that following politics is so frustrating is that those of us watching a debate or speech know that what the candidate is saying is being filtered through an ideological lens. Really, Republican, you can’t think of one single instance where a public agency is better at doing something than a private company? Really, Democrat, there’s not a single public school teacher who’s not good at his or her job?

It’s like in 2008 when then-candidate Barack Obama couldn’t say publicly that President Bush’s troop surge in Iraq had worked, because you can’t be the guy running on the platform that everything the guy before you did failed when at least one of those things actually succeeded. So, candidate Obama’s position was that decreasing violence in Iraq was due to both the surge and the Sunni awakening. (And then as president, he sends a troop surge of his own to Afghanistan, which shows just exactly how effective he thought the surge concept was.) Most voters roll their eyes and deal with this kind of thing because we know that it’s just part of the game.

But what about when something a candidate says is proven to demonstrably wrong, as opposed to just a difference of opinion?

In 2008, when the U.S. auto industry was teetering on the edge, Mitt Romney published an op-ed in the NewYork Times saying that GM, Chrysler and the gang should be allowed to go bankrupt and be picked apart by private investors. (The fact that there were no private investors willing to do so apparently escaped him.) On one level, you can look at this as something Romney needed to do as a presumptive front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination – that is, distinguish himself from the administration he’d be running against.

If I’d been working for Romney at the time, I’d have advised him to soft-pedal a bit. When you’re predicting the future, it’s wise to allow for the possibility that you might be wrong. It would’ve been possible for Romney to make the case that the auto industry needed to adapt to modern markets without writing something as explicit as: "If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye." That's kind of hard to step back from.

But Romney can’t re-write that op-ed. So now what? Romney’s in a position where he has few paths to Electoral College victory, and most of them go through Ohio, a state heavily dependent on auto industry jobs. What do you say when a position you publicly staked in the past turns out to be dead wrong?

Option 1: Pretend You Didn’t Say That – something Romney’s had no trouble doing on pretty much every issue thus far. It’s a bad idea in this age where everything lives forever online… unless you just really like being made fun of on “The Daily Show.”

Option 2: Double Down – what Romney seems to be doing. He’s still running ads in Ohio implying heavily that Jeep is moving jobs to China, a stretch of truth so egregious that even Chrysler and GM CEOs have felt compelled to refute it. Even for the non-Romneys, this is risky. You think it makes you look resolute, but it actually makes you look stubborn, out-of-touch and kind of douchey. “Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” isn’t a viable PR strategy in the Internet age.

What Romney should do is bite the bullet and go with Option 3: Acknowledge and Move On. It’s not that hard. “Given my lengthy business experience, I genuinely did see a structured bankruptcy as the best option at the time. I’ve seen it work time and time again. In hindsight, though, I can see how the administration’s bailout did benefit the auto industry in an unprecedented economic circumstance. We got lucky. But we won’t always be lucky, which is why I believe” yadda yadda yadda Ayn Rand. See? Now it’s over.

Acknowledge and Move On isn’t easy. Much of the time, it means swallowing your pride, when what you really want to do is step and front of every available TV camera and scream “I WAS RIGHT, DAMMIT! ONE DAY YOU PEOPLE WILL WRITE SONGS ABOUT ME!!!”

But that’s what leaders have to do. Leaders also have to take in new information even if it means challenging their dearly held views. President Obama was going to close Gitmo on day one, until whatever he learned post-inauguration convinced him not to. He was opposed to same sex marriage, until he adapted and changed his mind. I know, I know – whether it’s a genuine conversion or a pragmatic understanding that the prevailing winds have shifted doesn’t really matter. What matters is that a leader responds to what he or she takes in, and he or she does so without pretending that the past didn’t happen.

If Mitt Romney honestly thinks that, as president, he’s never going to be put on the hot seat by Congress or the media or the 300 million Americans it’s his job to serve, then personally I don’t want him anywhere near the White House. It’s not about positions. It’s about his apparent inability to say that at any point in history he was ever less than 100 percent right. That’s a dangerous quality for anyone to have, let alone the President of the United States.