Mitt Romney was right, as I wrote yesterday, to praise Wawa as an innovative private firm. But Romney's point went further: Using Wawa as an example, he said the federal government needs to be more efficient and sensitive to its clients' needs.
Romney is right that the federal government is sometimes maddeningly difficult to work with. For example, the Census Bureau has a horrible website. Census divides its data into arbitrary silos, makes them available in inconvenient formats, and even peppers its website with dead links. (Seriously, go to this page and click on "age and sex." See?)
It would be nice if the Census shared Wawa's enthusiasm for user friendliness; it's good for a candidate to have that goal for the federal government. But there are also three important limits to Romney's intent to Wawa-ize government.
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