Spring 2007
The Mitt Romney You Don't Know
He’s a super-rich, right-wing, carpetbagging, Olympics-fixing blue-state governor with two Harvard degrees who’s running for president. Got that? Meet the real Mitt Romney.
Such sentiments help explain why, on February 13, Romney officially announced his presidential campaign at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In a navy suit, Romney stood in front of a Ford SUV hybrid and an AMC Rambler. His family—wife Ann, five sons, five daughters-in-law, 10 grandchildren—waited in the wings.
“I always imagined that I would come back to Michigan someday,” he said. Dad and I loved cars…The Rambler automobile that he championed was the first American car designed and marketed for economy and mileage…It transformed the auto industry.”
It was a telling overstatement: As anyone who reads the business pages knows, the Rambler clearly did not transform the industry. And the museum was a bizarre place in which to launch a campaign: as Jewish activists pointed out to the candidate, Ford was a notorious anti-Semite. Given Romney’s own sensitivity to religious prejudice, the museum seemed a loaded choice.
Some six million Americans are Mormons. By and large, they are family-oriented, hardworking and prosperous. But some Mormon beliefs strike many people as odd: that God Himself was once a human being; that humans exist as “spirit children” before their birth; that people can be baptized and converted to Mormonism after their death (to save them from hellfire); that after death people can become godlike. Up to 40 percent of Americans in polls say that they will not vote for a Mormon for president. Many of them are evangelical Protestants, the kind whose support Romney is now seeking. Ann Romney has suggested to her husband that he deliver a “JFK-style speech” on the separation of church and state, but Mitt doesn’t seem to think it necessary. “People have interest early on in your religion and any similar element of your background,’’ he told the New York Times. ‘’But as soon as they begin to watch you on TV and see the debates and hear you talking about issues, they are overwhelmingly concerned with your vision of the future and the leadership skills that you can bring to bear.’’
What matters, Romney says, is not the specifics of your religious faith, but the simple fact of belief in God. “We need to have a person of faith lead the country,” he said recently. That’s why he injects religious language into his speeches, saying, as he did in Baltimore, that Americans are “a God-fearing people” and that everyone is “a child of God.”
It’s paradoxical: You should vote for a presidential candidate because he is religious, but you shouldn’t vote against a candidate for the same reason. And at the same time that Romney says Mormonism isn’t an issue in his campaign, he is reaching out to Mormons, sometimes in unprecedented ways. He has targeted the Mormon community for fundraising, though that is little different than Dukakis raising money from Greeks or Joe Lieberman from Jews. But in late 2005, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, Romney “sought the advice” of LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley—whom Mormons consider the earthly voice of God—on whether he should run for president. And last October, the Boston Globe reported that a Romney aide was coordinating planning with church officials on how to build Mormon support for Romney’s campaign. (Romney disavowed the effort.)
Perhaps some of these religious tensions are inevitable. Romney is breaking new ground here; no Mormon has ever mounted a serious presidential campaign (Utah senator Orrin Hatch tried, briefly, in 2000). Romney must convince Republican voters that on the one hand, he’s religious, but on the other hand, his religion isn’t a cult, despite the fact that some Christians consider its teachings blasphemy. This is not an easy gauntlet to run. But Republican candidates don’t have much choice in this regard, and John McCain and Rudy Giuliani are likely to have their own problems making themselves palatable to GOP primary voters. Whoever wins the nomination will then have to tack back toward the center, where the mood of the country seems to be.
In some ways things were simpler back in the ’60s, back when George W. Romney wanted to be president, back when you didn’t have to demonstrate your religious bonafides before you could be considered a credible Republican candidate. But Mitt Romney remembers what happened to his father, how the conservatives destroyed his path to the presidency, and he won’t let that happen to him. Unless, of course, it already has.
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