Campaigning Aside, Team Plans a Romney Presidency

As Mitt Romney and Paul D. Ryan fanned out across the country this week, glad-handing voters and donors, a smaller but no less important gathering was taking place on Capitol Hill: Romney’s transition team met on August 14 with more than a dozen loyalists from the private and public sectors in space borrowed from a law office.

Romney’s transition team, which has quietly been ramping up since June, is an extension of his campaign and reflects many hallmarks of the Romney operation — methodical and disciplined, with acute attention to detail. The team also offers a glimpse of what might be Romney’s approach to governing, functioning much like his old private equity firm, Bain Capital. The team is assessing the government and looking for ways to make it more efficient and streamlined. Romney’s transition team, known within the campaign as “The Readiness Project,” is led by Mike Leavitt, a former governor of Utah and a former secretary of Health and Human Services, and until recently included only three other advisers — Beth Myers, a top Romney adviser who worked on his transition team in 2003, when he became governor of Massachusetts; Bob White, a longtime friend of Romney who was chairman of his transition in Massachusetts; and Ron Kaufman, a senior adviser and Republican national committee member from Massachusetts. The meeting on Aug 14, however, reflected the fact that less than three months from Election Day, the Romney campaign is putting together a framework should he win the White House.