The latest Bloomberg Businessweek takes former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to task for bashing Preaident Obama’s Ivy League background during campaign speeches, despite the fact that Romney holds two degrees from Harvard.

But the article also offers some support for the notion that Romney might prove to be the type of successful technocrat the U.S. government needs to solve major problems:

Romney reached Harvard in 1971 after graduating from Brigham Young University and completing a Mormon mission overseas. He enrolled in a joint law and business school program, earning two graduate degrees in four years. Studious and ambitious, he thrived, reveling in the intellectual challenge and impressing classmates with his drive and discipline. “He had a gravitas,” says Howard Brownstein, a law school classmate. “You thought: This guy could be president. And I remember thinking that in 1971.”

Romney agreed to add law school to his business studies at his father’s request and carried George Romney’s battered brown leather briefcase to class. The elder Romney, a former Michigan governor, was then serving in President Richard Nixon’s cabinet after seeing his own White House ambitions dashed.

Brains and determination were taken for granted at the nation’s premier university. Romney stood out more for the intensity of his work ethic and his commitment to his Mormon faith. …

… Romney’s bottom-line way of thinking was especially suited to the MBA program’s emphasis on isolating key questions and finding answers by vacuuming up all available data. “Mitt is the ultimate pragmatist. He’s only interested in what will work,” says [law school classmate Howard] Brownstein, who later worked alongside Romney at Boston Consulting Group and now runs a crisis-management firm in Pennsylvania.