Utahns learned about Romney up close when the state's governor at the time, Mike Leavitt, tapped him in 1999 to rescue the scandal-plagued committee that was organizing the 2002 Winter Olympic Games. In the subsequent months, we watched him quickly assemble a top-drawer management team, impose financial discipline and turn a foundering ship around. He brought the Games in on budget, and brought the world a winter Olympiad of unrivaled brilliance.

That's one reason Utahns admire Romney.

Romney's leadership as governor of Massachusetts was not as stellar as his Olympics turn, but it was respectable. It also was good preparation for higher office. Managing a government bureaucracy in an Eastern state dominated by the opposition party is no picnic. But it gave him a leg up on issues of major national importance. An example was his bold experiment with health-care reform.

No other Republican candidate, not even Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who guided his city through the 9/11 crisis, can match Romney's executive resume in both government and the private sector. That's a big reason why we believe he is presidential timber and deserves the support of Utah's Republican voters on Feb. 5.

The other reason for Romney's outsized appeal in Utah, of course, is his Mormon faith. For us, that should not be an issue in this campaign. We believe with John F. Kennedy that so long as a political leader respects the separation of church and state, a candidate's personal faith is his own business. We believe that Romney respects that separation.

We concede that Romney has deeply wounded his own credibility by flip-flopping on an array of issues, most notably abortion. But there is evidence that he is at heart a moderate Republican, a fiscal conservative and technocrat with nuanced social views, who concluded that he must pander to the party's evangelical right to earn the GOP nomination. That pandering has been a mistake.

That reservation aside, we believe Mitt Romney is the class of the Republican field.