So as you all know, Mitt Romney wrote a scathing editorial about President Trump recently in which he complained about the president's, quote, "character." Yes, he complained about the president's character.

I watched Romney on an interview talking about some of the presidents that he considered to have good character. On his list was JFK. Did JFK have good character? Is that how you remember it? It feels to me like JFK should be on the list of presidents who had bad character but did a pretty good job. LBJ's on that list. People who were terrible human beings but apparently did a pretty good job. Bill Clinton, not so good on the personal stuff, pretty solid president in my opinion.

So it doesn't seem to be a great correlation between character and performance in office. But then there's also the real question of what is real character and what is theater, because there's an awful lot of politics that's just theater.

And this president, President Trump, he does more so than the other presidents. He adopts a role. He takes on a character depending on the situation. So his character that you would see giving a rally speech is really just a different person than you might see in person, than you might see in a meeting, etc. So it's kind of hard to say what is the president's character exactly because he can modify it for the situation.

He seems to have a bias toward effectiveness. So if the most effective thing is to insult somebody, he does. If the most effective thing in a given situation is to be nice, he's nice.

Case in point: What was the president's response to Mitt Romney's scathing public rebuke of the president? The president said he hopes that Mitt becomes more of a team player and that he looks forward to working with him.

Now if President Trump was a person who simply had bad character and that's just who he was all the time, he wouldn't be able to turn it on and off, would he? And you could see right in front of you that he just turns a switch and he says, okay, in this situation being nice to Mitt Romney is just good for me, good for the country, makes everything work better. So in this particular case I will not strike back because it doesn't make sense.

In this case I'm not worried about somebody who can modify their personality for the situation. I find that reassuring, not scary.

Here's my bottom line on Romney. I think people are saying why did Romney do it? Why did he do it now? Romney's saying that the reason he did it now is because he's taking office as a senator. It's a good time to get on record where he stands on the issues. But I don't think that's the real reason he did it.

Here's what I say is the real reason that Romney went hard at the president's character. Because it's the only thing that Romney feels he has an advantage over President Trump. It's the only thing. If you were going to say tell me some bad things about Mitt Romney, probably character would not be on the list. I don't think so. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know a lot of people who were criticizing Romney for any character flaws. You know, they've criticized him for political missteps, just normal stuff. But for the most part I think it's true that on a character role model basis, pretty solid guy.

But here's what I think is his plan. Keep in mind that Romney is a finance guy, a numbers guy. He's sort of a consultant, quantitative, very analytical kind of a background. What he's doing is one of the smartest things that you'll see in politics. Say what you will about Romney, about any criticism you will, but here's a statement that I think is just true. He's really smart, right? Does anybody disagree with that? No matter what you think of him as politics or anything else, he's a really smart cat.

And what he's doing here is the best risk management play you'll ever see. Because remember he comes from a world where risk management and assessing risk and making the right risk-reward decision is the whole game. That's how he made money.

Here's the risk. There's probably, I don't know how to put a percentage on this, but just for conversation let's say there's a solid 20% chance that President Trump will not run for a second term for whatever reason. Either because he changes his mind, he's a certain age, anything could happen. Maybe there's impeachment, maybe his poll numbers go down so much he doesn't want to. You could think of a number of reasons. But maybe collectively if you add them all together, maybe a solid 20% chance the president won't run.

So Romney is setting himself up as the emergency president who, if you need to break the glass and get the emergency president, he's ready. He's a senator. He's run for president. He made a good run for president. He's already made his argument for why he should be president. And when he was running for office he's considered a senior statesman. He solves the problem that the last president in this scenario, he would be solving the problem that people cared about the most from the last president.

So if he came in as sort of the emergency replacement, the emergency spare for the Republicans, if they just needed a last-minute "oh god, oh god, we don't have anybody, who are we gonna put in here" if President Trump doesn't run for re-election, Romney's there.

So on a risk-reward basis he took a fairly small risk by running the editorial. The small risk is that it would make it harder to work with people in the Senate. But not really, because people still need his vote. President Trump showed that instead of insulting him for this he was gonna play nice because he still needs Romney to be on his side. So Romney still has all the power he needs as a senator because a vote is a vote and they can't take that away from him.

So he took a risk. It looks to me to be the most solid, obvious emergency replacement GOP presidential candidate should President Trump not be running for a second term, or maybe to be ready for the term after that. But on a risk-reward basis it was a smart play.

I'm gonna give Romney an A+ for political instinct. He put himself in the position as the emergency backup president. A very low risk. It was a good play and I'm impressed actually by that. That doesn't mean that I support him for president. It only means that in this one limited case his risk-reward assessment looks quite smart.