The economic lessons the rest of the world could teach us

Passion is not enough to change the Republican Party. Despite the Tea Party’s massive burst of energy, it looks increasingly likely that the GOP will nominate Mitt Romney, the front-runner, the guy who ran once before, the former governor who waited his turn to be the standard-bearer. This is a familiar pattern for a practical, hierarchical organization — the same one that chose George Bush senior, Robert Dole, George Bush junior and John McCain. (The Democrats, by contrast, often nominate an outsider — John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.)

Yet something has changed in the Republican Party. You can see it in the attacks on Romney. He is portrayed as a private-equity tycoon who buys companies, hollows them out, outsources jobs and pays 15 percent in taxes. Instead of celebrating Romney’s work as an example of how the market functions — driving out inefficiency, generating productivity and creating a lean, mean capitalist machine — the other Republican candidates are criticizing it.