“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical/
Say rather that he’s…apolitical.”

The lyric was written by the Harvard mathematician and satirist Tom Lehrer about the Nazi rocket scientist turned American rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun:

A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience…
“In German or English I know how to count down,
Und I’m learning Chinese,” says Wernher von Braun.

Mitt Romney is no rocket scientist but, like von Braun’s, his loyalty on matters of policy is—what’s the right word here?—situational. Where he stands depends on where he sits. That seemed like his biggest liability in Iowa and New Hampshire, the sense that he had traded the liberal policy views he had held as a Massachusetts politician for the conservative views he needed to compete for the presidency.

Actually, however, that flexibility is part of his greatest strength, and if he embraces it, as he has started to do in and after the Michigan primary, it could win him the Republican nomination and the presidency itself.

Debates over political issues, especially in primaries, tend to revolve around sincerity. Voters want to be reassured that support for universal health care or opposition to gay marriage, asserted in the heat of a campaign, won’t be abandoned once the candidate has left their presence or been sworn into office. Up against Mike Huckabee’s bona fides as an Evangelical preacher and John McCain’s support for the troop surge before it worked—not to mention Ron Paul’s support for positions that nobody would espouse if they didn’t really believe in them–Romney’s convenient conversion to values-voterism seemed like a series of transparent and opportunistic flip-flops.

But Romney isn’t a politician. He’s a businessman who served a single term in a single political office. And in the world of business, as in most other areas of human endeavor, situational policy positions are not only common, but de rigueur. As president of the Ford Motor Co., Lee Iacocca sang the praises of Ford; when he was the head of Chrysler, then that was the nation’s best auto company. NFL coach Bill Parcells’ opinion as to the worthiest team in the league has moved from the Giants to the Patriots, from the Patriots to the Jets, from the Jets to the Cowboys and, most recently to the Miami Dolphins—all without being accused of being a flip-flopper.

In that context, it’s natural that as a candidate for office in Massachusetts, the country’s most liberal state, Romney would be an advocate for gay and abortion rights, while as a candidate before a conservative constituency, he would be an opponent of gay and abortion rights. Just as natural as that, as head of Bain Capital, which owned Domino’s, Romney would have been expected to be an advocate for the superior merits and service of Domino’s pizzas, while after leaving Bain, he would have felt free to praise—and even order—Papa John’s 16-inch pepperoni and sausage, all without anyone thinking less of him.

Romney’s situational policy views are a by-product of his greatest strength as a presidential candidate, his experience and success as a business executive, and arguably just the kind of experience a Republican-run country would need at in the White House.

Much has been made of the near unanimity on policy of the leading Democratic candidates. But in fact, the Republicans are just as united on basic policies. All of them see tax cuts as the government’s only effective economic policy tool. All of them are pro-life. All except McCain favor stricter enforcement of immigration laws and oppose giving illegal immigrants already in the country any advantage in becoming citizens. None of them support gay marriage. All of them supported the invasion of Iraq, and none of them say they would have continued along the diplomatic track had it been their decision. So despite the nit-picking debates over fine points of political dogma, the Republican challenge is not to select a candidate who represents the party’s philosophical mainstream—they’re all there, but to find a candidate who, once in office, could effectively execute and manage the policies and programs.

That has been the hallmark failing of the Bush administration. It has succeeded only when success consisted of legislative victories, like the tax cuts, or appointments, like those of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito; and, of course, not always even then: the aborted Harriett Miers appointment was a blunder explicable only by incompetence and misjudgment. Where success required accurate analysis, good decision-making and sustained management—the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina, for example—the Bush administration fell far short, not only causing untold misery to millions of people, but discrediting the underlying conservative philosophy.

That should have been Romney’s niche in the seven-man GOP presidential field: not the purest of them all, but the seasoned executive who could put into effect the policies they all agree on.

It could still be his niche. It was an important part of Romney’s victory in economically hard-pressed Michigan and is now part of his campaign rhetoric. Washington “is fundamentally broken,” said Romney in a post-Nevada release, “With a career spent turning around businesses, creating jobs and imposing fiscal discipline, I am ready to get my hands on Washington and turn it inside out.”

But Romney may find turning his campaign around harder than the turnarounds he engineered at Bain Capital. A business can back up a new message with improved products and services. Political trust is not so easily restored. Romney’s credibility was already strained by his pretense to social conservatism. The only improved performance that could validate his new persona won’t be available until after his election and inauguration.

And maybe not even then. Romney made a lot of money in business, but other than as head of the Olympics, his extended managerial experience is slim; he was less a manager what an MIT management professor called a financial engineer. Businessman Romney was not a bold trailblazer but a bet-hedger. He agreed to leave Bain & Company to join Bain Capital, according to the Boston Globe, only after company founder Bill Bain not only guaranteed that he could return to his old job if the new one didn’t work out, but that, if he did return, a cover story would be “crafted…[to] explain Romney’s return as a matter of his being more valuable to Bain as a consultant. ‘So,’ Bain says, ‘there was no professional or financial risk.’”

Nor were Romney’s and Bain Capital’s efforts directed at the long-term success of the companies they took over. “Companies like Bain Capital,” says the Globe, “typically cash out of their investments in three to five years”—about the length of a single presidential term—after which the companies they have restructured are left to their own devices. Bain led one acquisition, for example, American Pad & Paper (Ampad), to run up a debt of $400 million, up by a factor of more than thirty, over just six years. When Ampad couldn’t pay its debts it was forced into bankruptcy. “Workers lost jobs,” the Globe reports, “and stockholders were left with worthless shares. Bain Capital, however, made money—and lots of it.”

An electorate that chose Romney, or any Republican, might not see the loss of jobs as a sign that Bain’s management of AmPad wasn’t a success. But management experience acquired in an environment in which bankruptcy was part of a success story might not be exactly what is needed by a country fresh from running Iraq into a ditch. And President Romney, like President Bush, might find it harder to bail on an investment than it was in the private sector.

Still, Romney’s managerial experience and adopted conservative orthodoxy, combined with a blameless personal life and a bottomless bank account, may be enough to vault him over the colorful characters who make up the rest of the Republican field. It’s at least his strongest suit, and maybe the only one worth playing.