I cannot recommend more highly Ryan Lizza's profile of Mitt Romney in the October 29, 2007, New Yorker. The piece discusses Mormonism, Romney's business background, and his performance on the stump. Most important, however, is Lizza's discussion of what he calls "Bainism," or Romney's consultant mentality:
Romney has said that his training as a management consultant taught him a methodology for problem-solving. He told the conservative author and talk-show host Hugh Hewitt that the conceptual tools he had picked up in the business world gave him the confidence to walk into a C.E.O.'s office and offer advice on an industry with which he was unfamiliar. 'You're going to get data that they have but have never analyzed in the proper way, and then you're going to tear it apart and debate it amongst yourselves and with them and find new and bold answers,' he told Hewitt. Ever since Romney moved into the political profession - starting with his failed Senate run - a great question has been whether this is a transferrable skill.
Later in the article, Lizza draws an important distinction between business and politics:
In every Republican debate, [Romney] glows with the bright effervescence of a born salesman. But a political campaign may not be as susceptible to the strategies of management consulting as a business, where advising a corporation to reinvent itself is standard practice. Romney's strategic audit of the 2008 campaign suggested that his party was hungry for a reliable Republican. For Romney, the danger is that of going too far in attempting to please every constituency. In doing so, he may have underestimated the importance of authenticity, an asset that in politics is sometimes more valuable than ideological purity.
To carry Lizza's formulation a step further, in order to win the Republican nomination, the product that consultant Romney had to "reinvent" was ... himself. The 2008 GOP primaries will test many propositions, including the idea that winning in politics is like winning in business.