Mitt Romney Inc.: The White House That Never Was [Holy Crap Did We Ever Dodge A Bullet]
More: Mitt Romney Inc.: The White House That Never Was
In the months before the 2012 election, a group of high-powered consultants and political operatives prepared a secret report for candidate Mitt Romney, explaining how he should take over and restructure the federal government should he win the presidency.
“The White House staff is similar to a holding company” read one PowerPoint slide, which would have been presented to President-elect Romney as part of an expansive briefing on the morning after Election Day. It went on to list three main divisions of the metaphorical firm: “Care & Feeding Offices,” like speechwriting, “Policy Offices,” like the National Security Council, and “Packaging & Selling Offices,” like the office of the press secretary. This was the view of the Presidency Romney would have brought with him to Washington, a glimpse of the White House that never was — and plan that never saw the light of day.
But now the secret is out. On May 29, the Romney Readiness Project, the Republican candidate’s transition organization known as R2P, published a 138-page report detailing how it prepared for a potential Romney victory. It is the product of a team of nearly 500, who labored in Washington and around the country to be ready to help Romney assume the reins of power on January 20th, 2013, in accordance with the Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010.
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/06/02/mitt-romney-inc-the-white-house-that-never-was/#ixzz2VBatTa90
But wait! There’s more! The R2P also released a detailed set of recommendations about how, exactly, to manage this “holding company” that already had its own procedures, work culture, and norms in place, some of which had been developed over the past two or so centuries:
Corporate-style training seminars were planned for appointees and nominees before the inauguration to teach management skills.
A plan to restructure White House operations to suit Romney’s corporate management style, with clear deliverables.
Detailed flow charts delineating how information and decisions were disseminated through the administration to achieve “unity.”
Plans to evaluate Cabinet secretaries’s performance by “systematically assessing the efforts of their departments in contributing to [Romney’s] priorities and objectives, perhaps by a newly created ”deputy chief of staff for Cabinet oversight.
Don’t worry, they weren’t going to ruin the White House and leave the country alone; the first 200 days also included plans to develop a “Reagan Economic Zone” to increase growth, repeal Obamacare, repeal other “grown-inhibiting” Obama policies, end the use of union workers in federal projects, deregulate the coal industry, and approve Keystone XL.
Read more at wonkette.com
