Mitt Romney may well be the most perfectly equipped candidate for the presidency that the nation has had since Henry Clay. Note that Henry Clay was not elected president but his equipment was such that had he been, he would have moved into the presidency with surety and resolve. For his time there was never a man so superbly fitted than Clay. He had excellent legislative and administrative experience, was a native genius but was defeated repeatedly and often times closely, for president. The fact that Abraham Lincoln worked for him, cheered him and adored him as a candidate tells you much about Clay.

It is the country’s severe loss that it had not the benefit of Clay. Before we get to the Romney comparison, let us remember that Clay was born in Virginia in 1777, that he received his elementary education from a British pedagogue before going on to become a shop assistant in Richmond. He was a clerical secretary…copying legal arguments in longhand to Thomas Wyeth, chancellor of the Commonwealth of Virginia. He moved from there to become assistant to the attorney general of Virginia, thento the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg where he studied under George Wythe, one of the legal genius’ of the Constitution. By age 20, endowed with this matchless education, he moved to Kentucky where as a young lawyer he soon achieved a matchless reputation for legal skill.

At age 34 he was elected to the U. S. House from Kentucky and as a freshman, because of his great reputation, was chosen as Speaker of the House on the very first day. Prior to that, Speakers were regarded as parliamentarians; Clay turned it to its proper role as conceived by the founders: second only to the power of the president. He invented the concept of appointments under the committee system (then the Democratic-Republican party). He sought to resolve racial tension and segregation. Seeing that the economy deserved protection in the country’s infant days, he devised what he called “the American System.” Since British factories were overwhelming those of the U.S. with cheaply imported goods, he designed tariffs which protected at that tender time the nature of American industries.

He understood that the country needed to grow and supported governmental support of the infrastructure. Turning to the problem of slavery, he pioneered a compromise that brought in Maine to the union as a free state and Missouri as a slave state, maintaining a precarious balance, forbidding the extension of slavery north of 36-30, the northern boundary of Arkansas.

So at the age of 43 when Jefferson’s Republican party ceased to exist, he ran for president against Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. Running third, he supported Adams so that the House picked Adams the victor. As Adams’ secretary of state, he learned the executive branch and also formed a new party, the National Republicans. In foreign policy he was a supporter of independence for nations in Latin America. When Adams term ended he left the state department, was elected U. S. Senator by the Kentucky legislature, then helped broker reduction of the tariff gradually as the U. S. economy gathered its own strength…helping to shore up the supremacy of the federal government over the states.

When the Whig party emerged, he became its dominant leader, moving to implement the “American System” of roads and internal improvements. In 1832 at age 55, he was re-nominated for president by a new party he pioneered, the National Republicans which correctly opposed Andrew Jackson’s Know Nothing opposition to Hamilton’s idea of the Bank of the United States. He lost to Jackson who was decisively and pig-headedly wrong on the issue. Switching back to the Whig Party in 1840, (parties then were fluid and indeterminate), he sought the Whig presidential nomination at 63 but lost to a vapid war hero, William Henry Harrison who died a month after inauguration. Four years later at age 67 he ran again warning that the antagonism between North and South was coming to a boil. Ignored, he lost. In 1848 with sectional tensions near the breaking point he sought the presidency again at age 71, losing to a cipher but public hero, Zachary Taylor.

Retiring to Kentucky, he was drafted into duty again and elected to the Senate without barely lifting a finger at age 72 where he wrote the Compromise of 1850 to fend off the War of Succession, admitting California as a free state, allowing slavery in New Mexico and Utah terrorities, banning the slave trade in the District of Columbia which postponed the Civil War for an additional eleven years. An excellent poker player, resolute bourbon drinker and negotiator, he died at age 75 and was rated by John F. Kennedy as one of the five greatest senators in U. S. history. Had he been elected president there is little doubt that the U. S. could have negotiated an end to slavery with gradualism and detoured the Civil War in perpetuity.

Clay was the greatest man in U.S. history who never became president—with vastly greater talents for the office than John Quincy Adams, Jackson (yes, with all Jackson’s plebian virtues), Harrison (certainly), Tyler (absolutely) Van Buren (certainly), not Polk (who was a genius) but Taylor (positively) but not Polk who was a genius, but infinitely greater than Fillmore and far surpassed Pierce. Clay’s death in 1852 led to him being mourned nationwide, a part of the “Great Triumvirate” and “Immortal Trio” with his colleagues Webster and Calhoun—of whom Clay was indisputably the greatest. It was a tragedy that Clay was not elected over Adams, Jackson, Harrison, Van Buren and Taylor.

Mitt Romney may well be…and I think he in fact is…the best equipped and most powerful intellectually of anyone running on either side—but he is not campaigning to his strength. Just as Clay’s virtues lay in his brilliant sense of legislative compromise and forestalling of the War, Romney’s lie in a matchless vision of the problems before the country and unexcelled administrative ability. Instead of campaigning from his strength…his bio, graduating from Harvard Law with honors while graduating also in the top 5% of the Harvard Business School…starting Bain Capital from nothing and turning it into a $4 billion firm…doubling the return on investment in a single year on average…turning the Salt Lake Olympics around from a disaster into a money-making enterprise…he is allowing himself to be drawn into this stupid “who shot John?” non-profitable “debate” with his colleagues on when he became a pro-lifer, when he decided to oppose same-sex marriage…all that nonsense.

It is not important at all…not worth a fig of difference…when Romney became a pro-lifer. The important thing for social conservatives is that he is. The political conditions within the Republican party necessitate that the president move differently from the governor of Massachusetts…just as they necessitated that Ronald Reagan move from the mid-1960s as governor of California to the presidency of the United States. This dreadful caterwauling of Romney’s being a switch-artist utterly fails to appreciate his spectacular administrative and visionary gifts.

To a great degree, Romney himself is responsible for allowing him to be drawn into a nihilistic “my conservatism is more valid than yours” controversy. By agreeing to reportorial inquisition he is playing the enemy’s game. And for Republicans to bother themselves about such minutiae and neglecting the hierarchy of talent is like Whigs of a bygone age settling for lesser men when a superb candidate is on hand. How long is it going to take for them to stop niggling about when one took a certain stand and the circumstances attendant to it…rather than concentrate on current stands, a comparison of philosophies and abilities? It’s maddening.

To a great degree, Romney is to blame for allowing his campaign to concentrate on these baseless points of trivia.