(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

I really have no interest in dumping on Jimmy Carter. The man’s post-presidential work has often been extremely admirable, more than enough to excuse the occasional gaffe or poorly-advised action. Man’s earned a pass. Still, to see him reinforcing the notion that the “real Mitt Romney” is no ideologue, but a pragmatic, data-driven technocrat, and assuming that his presidency would largely proceed along those lines, forces me to ask the question: on what basis are we assuming that the “real Romney” is technocratic?

Sure, it jives with his career, which was all about engrossing himself in data and making practical decisions on what to do with companies. But can you really mount the argument that any element of Romney’s life shares continuity with his political persona, evolving as it does to win elections? This is the guy, after all, who used to love Planned Parenthood (and now wants to end it), who once boasted about how he’d be a more valuable ally to gay rights groups than Ted Kennedy, and so on. More to the point, he was known for telling the moving story of how his grandmother died procuring an illegal abortion as a reason for why he was pro-choice. Guess grandma lost out when Mitt wanted to be president. Still, if he can shrug off something as personally meaningful as that, why wouldn’t he be able to shrug off some old career practices and become a Randist? The notion that Romney is a data-crunching technocratic politician seems to have originated as spin by Romney’s top lieutenant, Eric Fehrnstrom, back in 2007, and it’s pretty bloody brilliant to introduce this notion into a news media that worships such concepts. On the surface, Romney’s campaign was really no more or less demagogic than Gingrich’s or Santorum’s, and was considerably less honest than at least the latter’s. But the media has not held his feet to the fire for this because, hey, he’s got an election to win for pete’s sake! When he’s president, surely he’ll be a moderate technocrat again. But considering the demagogy of Romney’s campaign, the regular deceit and hyperpartisanism on display, we have to ask ourselves, if Romney is a technocrat, what does the term even mean?

To me, the notion of the “technocrat” is self-serving spin, typically on behalf of moderate Republicans. The term essentially means someone who makes decisions based solely on their practical merits, ignoring personal benefits or ideology. This is, needless to say, an ideal, and not necessarily a great one. Ignoring prevalent ideologies is itself an ideology, and perhaps the worst of the lot, i.e. contrarianism. Ignoring one’s own party and the electorate occasionally might need to happen, but often it’s just hubris, as happened when Jimmy Carter didn’t listen to what his party wanted from him and almost lost renomination in 1980 (and never could reassemble his party for the fall), while George W. Bush ignored the electorate in 2006 and suffered a thumping. So generally, I think this concept of a technocrat is overblown. But it’s the absolute perfect concept for a Republican trying to govern in a state that overwhelmingly believes in government to utilize. In addition to Romney, the politician to whom the term is most frequently applied is Michael Bloomberg, and searching for “bloomberg technocrat” yields over two million hits. This fits. New York City is a very liberal place, just like Massachusetts, and running as an anti-government activist there would be entirely unsuccessful. So both men sold themselves as technocratic problem-solvers who were just interested in making things more efficient, and thus positioned themselves for optimum media coverage in areas that are not exactly Republican-friendly. (By way of comparison, even though Bobby Jindal has about as technocratic a profile as one can imagine, he doesn’t even have one sixth of the hits in a “technocrat” search that Bloomberg does, and is rarely described in such terms.) This all is, of course, the old Rockefeller Republican strategy. That fact isn’t lost on reporters.

I honestly have no idea what sort of governing strategy Mitt Romney would use as president. But the idea that he’s a default technocrat seems to me to be wishful thinking driven by biases in the media and in politics. Romney himself abandoned being a pragmatic technocrat as soon as he decided to run for president, essentially becoming a pro-life, culture warrior Republican starting in 2005. And the national electorate is, ahem, not as keen on government as the electorate of Massachusetts. So I don’t see why he would necessarily be a technocratic president when being a more traditional, “gov’mint is our problem” sort of Republican would probably work better for him.