Early internal polls confirmed a growing fear inside the Kennedy camp: “Kennedy fatigue” had set in. Many Massachusetts voters viewed him unfavorably. “There was, from the beginning, a sense of urgency about the campaign that had nothing to do with who was on the other side,” said one former Kennedy staffer. “It was dangerous territory.” Nor did Kennedy, who was going on sixty-two, look or sound especially good. He had gained weight. His face was mottled. He spoke with labored breaths. “People said to me, ‘You know, he’s getting older, he’s over the hill. He’s not coherent anymore,’ ” Romney recalled. “I was getting ready for this guy that was going to be kind of a doddering old fool. I’d be able to crush him like a grape.”
In Romney, Republicans had found a perfect foil for Kennedy—in appearance, worldview, background, and lifestyle. He was a fit, upstanding Mormon with thick, winning hair and an unassailable home life. He was brainy, well spoken, and enormously successful. All the ingredients seemed to be in place. And with Kennedy faltering, it seemed just the right moment. “This,” Romney would later say, “is the chance of a lifetime.” But first Romney had a lot of questions to answer. It would be his first foray into politics, after all, the first time, really, that he’d been forced to ponder what he stood for outside business, family, and faith. What were his issues? What did he believe? Sure, he was against Kennedy, but what was he for? In other words, who was Mitt Romney?
He was, technically speaking, a first-time candidate. But he entered the political arena with a seasoned self-confidence, a legacy of his parents. He’d learned something of politics at the feet of his father and watched his mother, Lenore, wage her unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid in 1970. For the Romneys, as for the Kennedys, public service seemed to be almost a prewritten chapter. And like the Kennedys, the Romneys had the money to enter the fray at an immediate financial advantage. Young Mitt had absorbed many lessons at his parents’ side. He knew the arc of a campaign. He knew the importance of communicating a clear message and the pitfalls of straying from it. He knew the loss of privacy that came with public life and that he must be wary of the press—whose questions and scrutiny had helped bring his father’s presidential hopes crashing down. “He knew what the game was,” said one veteran Massachusetts GOP operative. What he didn’t know much about was the state Republican electorate, whose support he would need—and quickly—to fend off primary challengers and build toward a showdown with Kennedy in the fall. He knew almost none of the key players, but it was, as it happened, a fortuitous time to be a fresh Republican face. After a long political winter, the Massachusetts GOP was on the rebound, in large part because of William F. Weld, who, campaigning as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, had captured the governor’s office in 1990. Weld had modernized the traditional, moderate mold of Massachusetts Republicanism, and the formula seemed to hold great promise.
Even before all that, state Republican leaders, desperate to rebuild the party behind new names, had tried to recruit Romney into politics. “You ought to consider running for office—we could use a guy like you,” Joseph D. Malone, then the executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, said he told Romney over lunch in the late 1980s. “You’d be a perfect fit for a run for governor or U.S. senator.” Romney just chuckled and said, “Someday.” So he stayed in the background, sending occasional checks and showing up at fund-raisers. He didn’t even join the Republican Party until October 1993, switching his registration from unenrolled in preparation for his Senate run. He had given money to Democratic congressional candidates and had voted for Paul Tsongas, the iconoclastic liberal, in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He was, the veteran Republican operative said, “a very attractive unknown quantity.”
Romney’s enigmatic political identity would become a liability as he got deeper into the race. Some of his positions seemed to be calibrated for voter approval, not necessarily reflective of personal convictions. Strategy trumped ideology: what kind of candidate did he need to be to win? One conservative columnist complained that Romney was simply “philosophically vacuous.” Over the top as that assessment may have been, it was indicative of Romney’s challenge, even among those who should have been his natural allies. One thing, however, was clear from the beginning: change was the campaign’s watchword, the theme around it they would build everything else. Kennedy, Romney felt, had simply lost touch with Massachusetts. “That was his entire focus,” said Seth Weinroth, a lawyer whom Romney tapped to run his state convention effort.
Romney opened his campaign headquarters near Fresh Pond in North Cambridge, a short drive from his Belmont home. As in most campaigns, factions developed; there were the Washington consultants who handled TV ads; the local team led by the chief strategist, Charles Manning, and campaign manager Robert Marsh; the family and friends who volunteered; the fund-raising team; and some of his colleagues from Bain. At least in the beginning, they worked in concert. The team staged a campaign kickoff at the Copley Plaza in February 1994. Romney promised two hundred supporters that he would go to Washington and “tame the monster” of government, saying, “It’s time to come home, Ted.”
His bravado masked the practical concerns that lay ahead. Romney needed the support of the Republican rank and file—many of whom wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a police lineup—to get past his GOP competitors, including John Lakian, a businessman and unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1982. Early in 1994, Lakian and Romney had lunch in downtown Boston at what is now the Langham Hotel. Romney urged him to drop his Senate bid and run instead for the House against Gerry Studds, a Democrat from the South Shore. Romney’s rationale was that Kennedy would be hard enough to beat without having to weather a primary battle. Lakian thought about it but called Romney a few days later and told him no. Romney also had to win the backing of at least 15 percent of the delegates at the spring state Republican convention to qualify for the primary ballot in September. So the Romneys set out for Republican meetings and caucuses across the state, splitting up to woo delegates from different regions on the same night. Mitt would go to one town, while Ann, George, and Mitt’s eldest son, Tagg, then twenty-four and just finished with his degree at Brigham Young University, would each represent the campaign in others. “We knew nobody,” Ann said later. “We did not know a single Republican activist.” George, who was eighty-six, was a particularly popular attraction, given his political résumé and reputation for brash honesty.
The campaign’s media team, Greg Stevens and Rick Reed, meanwhile, was putting together Romney’s first TV ad, a sixty-second biographical spot designed to introduce him to voters. In it, Romney earnestly described how he and Ann, with Tagg as a baby, had first come east on the Massachusetts Turnpike in a Ryder truck, deciding to make a life there. The early spots worked. “He just made great strides. The more he was known, the better he did,” Reed said. Romney was also proving that he could raise money, above and beyond whatever contributions he might make from his own bank account. His fund-raising success helped establish him as the GOP front-runner. The campaign organized a team of lawyers to carefully vet each contribution, to avoid accepting checks from unsavory donors.
In those early days, Romney was getting a rousing reception, and his team was in high spirits. He was David, cheered on for having the temerity to go after the lurching Goliath, and that aroused a kind of underdog spirit. “Clearly everybody understood that this was the tallest order and the most daunting challenge in American politics at the time,” Weinroth said. Inside the campaign, the mood was serious but playful and informal. At headquarters, family and friends mixed easily with staff. They ordered so often from a nearby Domino’s that pizza boxes littered the place. “To this day,” a former staffer said, “I don’t think I can eat Domino’s pizza.”
Ann assumed the role of den mother, supplying the troops with M&Ms, popcorn, and cookies; making sure the office was stocked with supplies; and coordinating volunteers. “She was looking out over everybody,” said one former
aide. Ann also expanded her role as a sounding board for her husband, speaking out when a phrase or message didn’t sound right or a piece of clothing was unflattering—“Don’t wear that shirt,” she’d say. And she could dish out prickly retorts. After Janet Jeghelian, a former talk-show host and one of Romney’s GOP rivals, called Romney an “empty suit,” Ann fired back, “How would she know? When’s the last time she checked?”
Romney, often in open-collar shirts and slacks, was heavily engaged in day-to-day campaign operations, former staffers said, but he let people do the jobs for which he’d hired them. “He doesn’t sit in a campaign office and micromanage,” said Michael Sununu, who oversaw research and policy. That had also been his way at Bain: gather smart people, focus on the target, and let them go to work. Often the Romneys’ kitchen in Belmont, which opened up into a family room space, was a site for campaign meetings. Aides would spread their work out on the counters as the Romney boys ran into and out of the kitchen for food. “You kind of are immediately absorbed into this family atmosphere,” one former adviser recalled.
On May 14, 1994, after several months of frenzied preparation, Romney faced his first political test. State Republican convention delegates gathered in a Springfield civic center to anoint a slate of candidates for that fall’s races. Romney’s game plan was to win big, knock out as many rivals as possible, and shred any doubt that he was the Republicans’ sole hope against Kennedy in November. The campaign ran its operations from a motor home parked in the belly of the convention hall. Inside the command center, for most of the day, were four people: Seth Weinroth; Weinroth’s assistant; and Romney’s parents, George and Lenore. “Here was this major political heavyweight who had been elected governor of Michigan, ran for president, and served in Nixon’s cabinet,” Weinroth said. “I was expecting that he would be there all day, telling me how to do my job.”
It was the opposite. Weinroth said George told him, “You’re the guy. You’re running the show. You just tell me what you need from me.” So Weinroth did, employing George to twist the arms of wavering delegates. He sent George, escorted by an aide or volunteer, onto the convention floor for surgical strikes, and the patriarch would make a forceful case for his son. On at least one occasion, his tactics backfired. Penny Reid, a Republican state committeewoman who was backing Lakian, was so offended by George’s pushiness that she told him she would work for Kennedy if his son won the nomination
But Weinroth’s convention strategy—from courting the delegates to distributing foam baseball gloves saying “I’m with Mitt”—worked. Romney cleaned up, winning 68 percent of the vote on the first ballot. Lakian, squeaking by with 16 percent, was the only other candidate to meet the threshold, setting up a September primary battle between the two. And the prize of winning the GOP nomination glistened brighter by the day: The Boston Globe published a poll that weekend suggesting that a majority of Massachusetts voters no longer felt that Kennedy deserved another term.
Romney used his convention speech to attack what he called the “failed big brother liberalism” of the thirty-two years Kennedy had been in office, highlighting increased crime and welfare dependency. “I will not embarrass you,” he told the crowd. “I will carry out with all my energies an attack, a resurgence of the principles you find dear.” Lakian, who vowed to press on, found encouragement from an unlikely source. After his speech, he was shaking hands when George Romney approached him. “He came out and said, ‘You gave the best convention speech, including my son,’ ” Lakian recalled. That evening, there was a private reception for staff nearby at a Sheraton. Romney had never been one to linger at parties, and this one was no different. As the staff, eager to blow off some steam after a grueling campaign stretch, celebrated over drinks, he made brief remarks, shook a few hands, and was gone.
On paper, it was now Romney versus Lakian. In practice, the race between Romney and Kennedy was already well under way. Few doubted that Romney would win the Republican nomination. Some called on Lakian to drop out, which he refused to do. Instead he cast both Romney and Kennedy as children of privilege who could never understand the middle class. As the primary campaign unfolded, Lakian began to charge that Romney was more conservative than he was letting on, particularly on social issues, a hint of what would follow in the months ahead. It was the first time Romney had been pressed for his views on abortion, gay rights, guns, and other issues. “Ideologically, I’m not sure he knew where he was until he got into the campaign,” Lakian said. “I think he was filling in the blanks as to what he did believe in.”
When Michael Sununu, the campaign’s research and policy guru, would sit down with Romney and talk through key issues like welfare reform, Romney, true to his Bain training, wanted to drill down into the details: Who supports this? Are there other alternatives? What does the national Republican leadership say about it? Less natural to him was the question “What do I think?” “There were a number of issues that were put before us that we responded to that I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to,” he recalled. He did his best to keep his focus on Kennedy. In August, the campaign distributed a slick videotape to voters, in which Romney, dressed in a blue-and-white-plaid shirt and addressing the camera directly, celebrated what he called “a real opportunity in Massachusetts to replace one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate.” He urged people to show support for his campaign by dialing 1-800-TEDS-OUT.
Kennedy and his advisers, meanwhile, were furiously trying to ramp up a moribund campaign apparatus. They launched a registration drive targeting minority voters. They prepared an unusual summer ad blitz to repair Kennedy’s image and remind voters of his accomplishments in the Senate. They hired additional advisers and even contracted with a Washington investigative firm to probe Romney’s background. One former Kennedy aide described a summer gathering of Kennedy’s statewide political organization in a ballroom in Hyannis, near the Kennedys’ Cape Cod compound. It looked to the aide more like a Bingo convention. “I’m looking out over this crowd of six hundred or seven hundred people, and they’re basically geriatrics,” the aide said. “I remember thinking ‘This is what happens when you’re a senator and you really don’t have a campaign, and you get reelected automatically every six years.’ ” That, the aide said, “was the point where I was most worried.”
It only got worse. As Labor Day came and went, polls began showing Romney just behind Kennedy, then pulling even with him, thanks in part to an effective TV ad Romney aired challenging Kennedy’s record on crime. With this Republican upstart suddenly level with Ted Kennedy, the race drew national, even international, attention. Kennedy and his advisers acted as if all this was to be expected—“polls do go up and down,” Michael Kennedy, the senator’s nephew and campaign manager, said at one point—but they were rattled. On September 20, Romney crushed Lakian in the Republican primary, fueling his momentum. Appearing before some five hundred supporters at the Sheraton Boston, Romney, flanked by Ann, their five sons, and his mother and father, cast himself as an agent of change, saying, “Now we ignite the final stage of this rocket, and the next stop is going to be the U.S. Senate.” It was, for the Romney team, the high-water mark. “I remember the feeling,” one former aide said, recalling the buzz among the staff, the volunteers, and the supporters. “It was a great night.”
Romney said he told colleagues when he first joined the race that he thought his chance of winning was about one in twenty, although Ann was more optimistic. Charles Manning, according to Romney’s account, was more blunt. “There’s just no way you can win,” Romney said Manning told him early on. Now, with the primary behind him, the wind at his back, and Kennedy seemingly on the run, Romney had changed his assessment. This was the race he’d wanted. New face against old. Change versus clout. And he liked his prospects. “After the primary,” Romney recalled, “I began to think, ‘Wow . . . I’m sort of catching on here. Maybe I could actually win this thing.’ ”
If Romney was beaming from behind the podium
on primary night, the smile slipped from his face the moment he descended the stage. A TV reporter, nudged by the Kennedy camp, immediately challenged Romney on his record at Bain. Hadn’t the firm slashed some jobs? “You saw the flash of anger,” said one former Kennedy aide, describing Romney’s reaction. It was something of an epiphany for the Democratic campaign: Romney seemed to have a glass jaw. “I walked in to Michael Kennedy and said, ‘All we have to do is keep the pressure on this guy, and we can beat him.’ ” It was the first strike in what would become the Kennedy team’s principal method of halting Romney’s ascent: tagging him as a corporate raider who had made millions at workers’ expense. For Romney, who claimed credit for having helped create some ten thousand jobs, the line of attack hit where it hurt. It was a soft spot he would never effectively address. “We didn’t want to let him take a deep breath,” the former Kennedy aide said.
Two days before the GOP primary, Kennedy; his wife, Vicki; and his top political advisers gathered at his Back Bay condominium for a Sunday-night strategy session. The mood was tense. Kennedy pollster Tom Kiley presented his newest numbers, which confirmed Romney’s surge. The race was deadlocked. The room overflowed with aggressive personalities who clashed over what to do, while Kennedy ate from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that a maid brought him. “It was one of the most sort of strange 1960s French film–type moments, where you can’t believe what’s going on around you,” recalled one adviser who was present. Kennedy agreed that they would have to raise and spend a lot more money than they initially planned. He knew his field organization would have to be rebuilt, and fast. Robert Shrum, one of Kennedy’s closest advisers, read scripts from TV ads he had produced, which portrayed Romney as a heartless businessman. Shrum recommended that they begin airing the spots immediately. Kennedy was uncomfortable going negative on Romney, a campaign tactic he had never before been forced to use. But he was persuaded by the gravity of the situation, by the fact that Romney had been attacking him, and by Vicki, who understood the political trouble her new husband was in. Vicki’s message was “This is real.” So Kennedy signed off. They would go after Romney, and hard.
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