Okay, but does a successful business career equal a good presidency? No. Most presidents have been lawyers, generals, and professional officeholders. Only a few have had big business careers, and this cadre of executives does not exactly inspire confidence. By contrast, the most successful presidents never ran big businesses. Franklin Roosevelt was a mediocre lawyer. Ronald Reagan was a rancher, actor, and union boss. Running a business and running a country are not the same thing.

That doesn’t mean the skills a C.E.O. could bring to the Oval Office are irrelevant, let alone disqualifying. But all those skills we associate with an effective executive—hiring talent, delegating authority, ensuring accountability—could also be associated with someone who has been a mayor, like Rudy Giuliani, or a former cabinet secretary, like Bill Richardson. Do I fear a President Romney? Not after the last four years.

I think the Bain Way—the love of data and vigorous debate—would have helped a President Romney make better decisions about Iraq than his classmate. (Of course, a monkey with a dartboard probably would have fared better.) “I think if you’d had General [Anthony] Zinni”—a war critic—“around the table arguing, it would have made a difference,” Romney tells me. “He’d have said if we’re able to topple Saddam quickly, [we] may end up in a sectarian war.”

The Bain Way certainly helped Romney as governor. Finding budget cuts came naturally to the former consultant. Also, the formulation of Massachusetts’ much-heralded plan for universal health care—which mandates that everyone buy coverage and offers subsidies for those who can’t afford it—was preceded by a Bain-style analysis revealing that the state’s uninsured crisis was less about poverty and more about making carefree young folk buy into the system. But at the same time, Romney was a political novice on Beacon Hill, and he saw his vetoes routinely overridden. Knowing what you can and cannot get through a legislature isn’t something you learn in business, no matter how great you’ve been at corporate turnarounds. When Romney has gone with his gut instead of data—as when he said he would double the capacity of the prison at Guan­tánamo Bay—he has sounded shrill.

It’s fitting for Romney that the last Massachusetts governor to end up as commander in chief was Calvin Coolidge, who publicly revered business more than any other president. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” Coolidge declared in one of his many lavish encomiums to free enterprise. “The man who works there worships there.” Romney, the hero of the Salt Lake Temple, has undoubtedly helped build some great temples of commerce. The church of governance, though, is far harder to lead.