There are two sides to being CEO of a complex organization. First, of course, is the “management” responsibility, organizing the troops, making sure the checks don’t bounce, fondling the goods and services going out the door, in a quality control kind of a way. And then there is the “retail” side of the job, with impassioned speeches and sparkling ideology and a public face that benefits the brand.

You can get away with being very good at one side of the task, and not so great at the other, if you know how to assign tasks to others. For instance, Banker & Tradesman publishes the photos of its really attractive columnists, not the editors and publishers and the like, whose pictures might frighten little children. That’s good management.

Politics is the enterprise that is perhaps most demanding of its CEOs. There’s no getting around the public side of the game – and while the internal management chores are important, your tools include a rambunctious workforce, an unstable board of directors and goals that are often fuzzy, at best.

The political leaders are all over the place, with some emphasizing ideology; others quiet competence; still others a public cha-cha designed to encourage applause and campaign contributions.

The best of the lot in recent years was Jeb Bush, who as governor of Florida, provided entertaining public policy offerings, in a privatizing, voucher-offering, tax-cutting, program shrinking kind of way – while at the same, time, not forgetting the lovable, retail side of the job. When the hurricanes hit, Jeb bludgeoned the hotel chains into allowing you to bring your dog in for the night, as opposed to abandoning him at home, while the water rose to his flea collar.

Jeb and I were urinating next to each other once in a bathroom at a National Governors Association meeting – and we spent the whole time talking about public policy. He was like that.

There may be no current Republican candidate for the White House with a more interesting challenge blending the public side and the back room than Mitt Romney, who managed to sneak into the commonwealth and get himself elected governor – as a Republican.

A Practical Man

Even as the current frontrunner, and the only GOP candidate running ahead of Obama in the polls, Romney seems a bit uneasy – and the reason is that tension between the management and retail sides of the political game. As governor, Romney was no circus entertainer – and his public policy instincts (especially on those toxic “social issues”) were muted by a business mind that said, “I’m in Massachusetts; what’s the point?”

He vetoed 874,209 pieces of legislation, with veto messages that sounded about as interesting as a memo to the corporate strategic planning department. Romney knew that 874,200 of his vetoes would be overturned.

His rescue (more like a hostile takeover) of Springfield was relatively quiet, competent and lacking in the kind of overt union-bashing that comes up in other states.

In the case of his version of ObamaCare, Mitt remains a bit shaky in explaining himself, since the national GOP wants to paint ObamaCare as a product of the anti-Christ. In fact, even in this, Mitt was being quite businesslike, except for that messy business of cost control.

Facing a chaotic, inefficient, peculiar healthcare “market” that is barely a market, Mitt conjured up the state insurance plan – and included the mandatory signup. Without it, the young and the healthy and the clever would wait until they got sick before swimming in the pool of socialized medicine.

To Mitt, the mess was not a struggle to the death between Socialists and Libertarians for freedom and liberty. It was just another messy piece of poorly managed business that needed to be fixed in a state small enough and wealthy enough to handle the increased demand. But, that doesn’t necessarily play so well on the GOP campaign trail.

There is much to be said for the mantra that government should be run more like a business. In the aggregate, the dream is largely impossible. But, if America wants to see someone give it a shot, Mitt would be an interesting pick.