[Jeb Stuart Thurmond]

Rolling Stone magazine decided to have a cover story about Mitt Romney and how he runs the companies he takes over. The idea is that he's going to run America the same way he runs, say, KB Toys - which is supposed to be a bad thing.

However, the plan backfired because the author has come to admire Mitt Romney, and stops just short of endorsing him:

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong.

...Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

...This is typical Romney, who consistently adopts a public posture of having been above the fray, with no blood on his hands from any of the deals he personally engineered. "I never actually ran one of our investments," he says in Turnaround. "That was left to management."

In reality, though, Romney was unquestionably the decider at Bain. "I insisted on having almost dictatorial powers," he bragged years after the Ampad deal. Over the years, colleagues would anonymously whisper stories about Mitt the Boss to the press, describing him as cunning, manipulative and a little bit nuts, with "an ability to identify people's insecurities and exploit them for his own benefit."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics...#ixzz25uASEtCw

What a man's man - a rock star of Wall Street, who has traded his guitar for a pad of pink slips, and his world tours for a ship full of factories headed for China.