Meet Lanhee Chen, Romney’s top wonk

Molly Redden profiles Lanhee Chen, Mitt Romney’s hard-charging policy director:

Colleagues describe Chen as possessing an almost pathological work ethic. Tevi Troy, Chen’s superior from his days in the Bush White House, bet me that every single person I spoke to would lead by describing his smarts. (They did.) Bob Moffit, the senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who hired Chen, called him “a dynamo,” while Sidney Verba, Chen’s Ph.D adviser at Harvard for his dissertation—which examined how judicial elections affect the law—remembers him as one of his most outstanding students. Kevin Hassett, an American Enterprise Institute economist advising the Romney campaign, compared Chen to “a Jason Furman, or a Peter Orszag-type,” saying, “He’s not a person who’s going to be easy to overwhelm.”