The Boston Globe this weekend offered a fascinating analysis of why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election. But for all the impact of ground games, turnout models and campaign strategies, Mitt Romney lost not because he failed to define himself to the American people, but because he succeeded. At the end of the day, he was inevitably "reduced to caricature, as a calculating man of astounding wealth, a man unable to relate to average folks" because that is who Mitt Romney is. Voters sized him up as a hyper-ambitious, amoral opportunist more than willing to mislead them on almost any topic. As his number one son Tagg revealed to the Globe, Mitt Romney was a liar to the end, still pretending he never wanted to President in the first place.

Tagg, who now provides his father office space at the Solamere Capital private equity firm his parents' $10 million investment and priceless connections helped create, performed one final campaign task for Mitt. How disappointed could his father really be, Tagg suggested, if he never wanted to be President anyway?

"He wanted to be president less than anyone I've met in my life. He had no desire to...run," said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. "If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn't love the attention."

Unfortunately, a mountain of documentation exists which confirms voters' suspicions that Mitt Romney was preparing to run for President of the United States even before he took the oath of office as Governor of Massachusetts 10 years ago. Contrary to the Romney clan's tall tale that it took the intervention of Tagg and Mitt's wife Ann to convince her husband to run again in 2012, Mitt Romney never stopped running even after his bruising GOP primary defeat in 2008: As the New York Times detailed in August:

Not long after Mitt Romney dropped out of the presidential race in early 2008, a titan of New York finance, Julian H. Robertson, flew to Utah to deliver an eye-popping offer.

He asked Mr. Romney to become chief executive of his hedge fund, Tiger Management, for an annual salary of about $30 million, plus investment profits, according to two people told of the discussions...

But Mr. Romney was uninterested. His mind -- and his heart -- were elsewhere, still trained in the raw days after his political defeat not on Wall Street but on the White House and an urgent quest: to be understood by an electorate that had eluded him.

Romney's quest for redemption was well underway by the time Barack Obama took the oath of office in January 2009:

Continue reading »

The New York Times is reporting that Walmart executives covered up details about bribery related to the building of new stores in Mexico and slowed an internal investigation into the bribery allegations. A former executive in Mexico told his superiors about a thorough campaign to bribe officials throughout the country in order to speed up the creation of stores so Walmart could establish market dominance. The executive knew the details personally and had detailed records. Initially Walmart sent investigators to Mexico to look into the matter and they found extensive corroborating evidence. That's when things went off the rails:

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Walmart’s leaders shut it down.

Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Walmart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Walmart in 2008. Until this article, the allegations and Walmart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed.

But The Times’s examination uncovered a prolonged struggle at the highest levels of Walmart, a struggle that pitted the company’s much publicized commitment to the highest moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.

Under fire from labor critics, worried about press leaks and facing a sagging stock price, Walmart’s leaders recognized that the allegations could have devastating consequences, documents and interviews show. Walmart de Mexico was the company’s brightest success story, pitched to investors as a model for future growth. (Today, one in five Walmart stores is in Mexico.) Confronted with evidence of corruption in Mexico, top Walmart executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing.

In one meeting where the bribery case was discussed, H. Lee Scott Jr., then Walmart’s chief executive, rebuked internal investigators for being overly aggressive. Days later, records show, Walmart’s top lawyer arranged to ship the internal investigators’ files on the case to Mexico City. Primary responsibility for the investigation was then given to the general counsel of Walmart de Mexico — a remarkable choice since the same general counsel was alleged to have authorized bribes.

The general counsel promptly exonerated his fellow Walmart de Mexico executives.

Continue reading »