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.
There are surely more pleasant things to do than hang out in a Marriott in Baltimore on a frigid winter day, but this February 2, a band of gay-marriage-trashing, illegal-immigrant-bashing, abortion-banning, activist-judge-canning Republicans have convened to talk shop. And so Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and current presidential candidate, is also in attendance. He’s the guest of honor, in fact. Romney has pilgrimaged to Baltimore to woo this group of red-staters, blandly known as the Republican Study Committee, hoping to convince them that he is a liberal-slayer they can count on.
In a banquet hall about the size of a high-school gym, with similar acoustics and charm, Florida representative Tom Feeney introduces Romney to around 80 paying guests and half as many reporters. Romney, he declares, was “a modern-day Henry V, doing battle with a Massachusetts legislature that is 85 percent Democrat.” The policies Romney crusaded for “will sell much easier in the rest of the country than in Massachusetts.”
A smiling Romney takes the stage wearing an elegant two-button blue suit with a blindingly white shirt and tasteful blue-striped tie. His square-toed black shoes are polished enough to double as mirrors. Much has been written about Romney’s looks—fans say he’s “straight from central casting,” doubters call him “a Ken doll”—and it’s true that, in the easy-on-the-eyes department, he has a substantial edge over his two leading GOP opponents, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Romney is tall and fit, with a Dudley Do-Right jaw and thick black hair. Dabs of white around his temples seem so calculated to suggest gravitas, if they’re not fake, they might as well be. When he speaks, he moves his hands in practiced, careful gestures—a Vanna White hand-roll here, a mild punch for emphasis there—as if he’s afraid of breaking something.
He was, he confesses, “a conservative Republican governor in a liberal blue state,” an experience which “confirmed some principles and educated me on some principles.” That’s an allusion to the fact that his position on social issues has grown sharply more conservative in recent years—conveniently coinciding, critics say, with his decision to run for president in a party whose conservative base holds enormous influence.
But Romney insists that he’s not really the one who changed—society did. During his governorship, “Massachusetts became a center stage for the most divisive issues facing our nation today,” primarily gay marriage and stem cell research. “We picked a lot of fights that we didn’t stand a chance of winning,” he concedes, blasting judges who act as if “3,000 years of recorded history didn’t matter”—particularly the four judges on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who, in 2003, ruled to legalize gay marriage.
Then he talks about Harvard. But Romney doesn’t mention that he went to Harvard, or that he graduated in 1975 with an MBA and a J.D. from one of the university’s most rigorous programs. Instead, he alludes to how an encounter with a Harvard scientist prompted him to fundamentally change his politics on abortion, just as he dramatically altered his stance on gay rights, just as he softened his pro-gun-control position and joined the National Rifle Association last summer.
“Just a few T-stops from the Statehouse, over at Harvard, scientists were preparing to clone human embryos—experimenting with human life itself,” Romney says. “We need to be wary of those who experiment with life…who toy with the building blocks of the family and society.”
In this room, Romney’s charisma is working; people are paying attention. They like to hear about Romney sticking it to Harvard—“the Kremlin on the Charles” Republicans used to call it—and Massachusetts, home of the reviled Ted Kennedy. And with his outsider language, his anti-big-government posture, and his sunny disposition—“I’m overwhelmingly optimistic,” he announces proudly—Romney doesn’t hesitate to invoke the spirit of Ronald Reagan. What with George W. dragging himself, lonely and bedraggled, to the finish line, the GOP could use a touch of the Gipper.
No, there’s no question that Romney is a viable candidate. He has a compelling résumé, bags of campaign cash, and page after page of endorsements. He is passionately committed to the race and fantastically hard-working; Romney just turned 60—you’d never know it to look at him—but his energy level would trump most men half his age. And he happens to be running in an election without an incumbent, in a primary in which his most serious opponents, McCain and Giuliani, have serious liabilities.
And yet, beyond these walls, Romney has been struggling. Well, more than struggling. He’s been beaten like a drum, really. Before most Americans even know who he is, he has been dogged by accusations that he is a man without principles, an empty vessel willing to say whatever it takes to get elected. The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, for example, recently called Romney a “counterfeit man”, saying, “If he were a coin, a vending machine would spit him out.” Ouch. And when the media isn’t scripting that story line, it’s teeing up the question of whether Americans will vote against Romney because he is Mormon.
It’s early yet; the New Hampshire primary is almost a year away. Romney will either ride out these controversies, dispensing with them at a time when most Americans aren’t following presidential politics. Or he’ll be labeled, defined, by them, which would probably doom his candidacy. Romney has spent years, maybe decades, preparing for this campaign. The moment when it will rise or fall is finally upon him.
American presidential politics, especially in this time of bitter partisanship and non-stop media, turns candidates into stick figures, masters of the sound-bite, allergic to spontaneity, ever-vigilant against the unscripted gaffe or the 30-second attack ad. Romney has both suffered from that cartooning phenomenon and played along with it. Yet underneath all the politics, Mitt Romney is an interesting and complex man—more substantial than the mainstream media will allow, more complicated than he himself wants you to know. Romney may be a flip-flopper. He is obviously a Mormon. In weighing his fitness for the presidency, these may be the least important issues to consider.
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