Mitt Romney: Mormonism, private equity, and the making of a candidate.
“He was the big man on campus,” Christensen told me. He owned an A.M.C. Javelin, the hottest car made by the auto company that his father, George Romney, had run. “He had a beautiful wife. His father was famous, he was handsome. Everybody wanted to be what Mitt was.”
.. Romney is very deeply a product of a series of interconnected, tightly enclosed worlds, with their own rules: Mormonism, business school, management consulting, private equity. Understanding him requires understanding the subcultures that produced him.
.. If the seed was planted back then, one of the lessons plainly was that you want to be the guy in the race who has the most money, not the guy who is dependent on the guy with the most money.
.. Three of Mitt Romney’s sons have Harvard M.B.A.s. I asked Eyring why so many prominent Mormons are attracted to business school. The educational ethic, he said, is “to be intellectually curious but to be practical. That will take a disproportionate portion of the population into commerce—schools of business.
.. Eyring noted that Joseph Smith’s expulsion from one state after another, and his murder in Illinois, impressed on Mormons the importance of being empowered participants in government.
.. “Most religions come to believe in the Zeus model of God. He was outside the universe and created everything. Latter-Day Saints believe that God is in the universe and his power comes from understanding the rules of the universe perfectly. Everything we learn makes us more like God. The impetus to learn is so strong because it helps us to become more like God.”
II. BUSINESS