For months, Kennedy researchers had been quietly mining Romney’s business record for political vulnerabilities. One recent deal caught their eye. A company called Ampad Corporation, which Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, had acquired in 1992, had just purchased a paper products plant in Marion, Indiana, from SCM Office Supplies. The day Ampad bought the factory, SCM fired the workers. Many were rehired, but at lesser wages and reduced benefits. The notice that workers received upon returning from their July Fourth weekend made clear that the layoffs were integral to the deal. It read, “The assets of SCM Office Supplies Inc. are being sold to Ampad Corporation. Therefore as of 3:00 p.m. today . . . your employment will end.”
Having taken a leave of absence from Bain six months earlier, Romney was not directly involved in the firings. But it was still his company. One former Bain executive who sat on Ampad’s board later said that Romney had the authority to resolve the dispute but instead let Bain managers focus on maximizing the company’s investment. Romney was a private-equity man and a coolly brilliant one; he was not yet thinking as a candidate. The story was political gold for the Kennedy campaign, neatly aligning with its overarching goal of casting Romney as a self-interested capitalist. “It was devastating,” said one former Kennedy staffer. But aides to Kennedy, thinking the senator would look weak coming out so aggressively against a comparative unknown, were leery of letting on about their involvement. So they encouraged the notion that the gift had fallen into their laps.
On September 1, 266 members of the United Paperworkers International Union went on strike at the plant to protest the deal. A union official called Kennedy’s campaign, which arranged for the union to tell the Indiana press about the Romney connection, allowing Kennedy aides to suggest that the story had broken independently. In the meantime, the Kennedy team was making big plans. On September 26, the campaign sent a crew to Indiana to film the workers for TV ads. Tad Devine, a partner of Shrum, went to Marion with a script for the workers to read on camera. But Devine quickly scrapped it when he realized how much better the workers’ own words were. Kennedy’s campaign tested those and other spots with a focus group. The ads featuring the Ampad workers were the clear winners.
Three days after the filming, on September 29, Kennedy went up with a series of six thirty-second TV spots featuring nine Ampad workers. They were withering. The workers—angry, plagued by economic uncertainty, and as authentic-sounding as they come—were more than happy to lay the blame at Romney’s feet. “He has cut our wages to put money in his pocket,” one worker said. Another, Sharon Alter, a packer who had been laid off after twenty-nine years with the firm, said, “I would like to say to Mitt Romney, ‘If you think you’d make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana, and see what your company has done to these people.’ ” Robert White, a fellow Bain executive who had joined Romney’s campaign for the general-election push, complained that the firm had invested in dozens of companies, the vast majority of which had been successful. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Kennedy would run some ads about the forty success stories instead of the handful that weren’t?” But White was no expert in politics. As Tad Devine said in defending the Ampad spots, “I don’t think we are under an obligation to tell Mitt Romney’s side of the story.”
As the TV onslaught continued, the Romney campaign was caught flat-footed. At first, Romney justified layoffs as sometimes being necessary to revive a business. “This is not fantasy land,” he said. “This is the real world. And in the real world, there is nothing wrong with companies trying to compete, trying to stay alive, trying to make money.” Romney’s pollster Linda DiVall started noticing that the Ampad ads were hurting, because voters, in open-ended questions, began describing Romney as coldhearted. Still, his favorability rating remained high, so the campaign didn’t panic. Romney did not air a TV ad giving his side of the story. Instead his campaign tried to change the subject, airing a spot criticizing Kennedy over his opposition to the death penalty. The paperworkers’ union then doubled down, sending a group of striking workers to Massachusetts as a “truth squad” to hound Romney on his home turf. They distributed leaflets blasting Bain and depicting Romney dressed as an executioner. On October 7, with reporters and cameras on hand to capture it all, strikers and local union officials got into an angry confrontation with Romney strategist Charles Manning outside Bain headquarters, shouting “union buster” as a deal to meet with Romney fell through. Two days later, the workers confronted Romney at the start of a Columbus Day parade. “I’d love to help and I’ll do my best,” Romney told them. “But there’s a separate management team running the company Ampad. I don’t work there.” One worker fired back, “I don’t anymore, either.” That night, Romney sat down with the workers at a hotel in suburban Newton to try to persuade them that the layoffs weren’t his fault.
But the damage was done. The Kennedy ad campaign would prove pivotal. Romney’s poll numbers began to slip. Despite his strategic mind, he had failed to adequately prepare for a most predictable line of attack—criticism of his business career. After he took leave from Bain, the campaign had not monitored the firm’s business deals for potential political fallout. “It’s something we should have anticipated, maybe not Ampad specifically, but an attack on his business record,” Robert Marsh, Romney’s campaign manager, said later. “I do blame myself for not reading the signals.” The whole thing began to wear on Romney. Lining up for the East Boston Columbus Day parade, Joseph Malone, the state treasurer, came upon Romney outside Santarpio’s, a legendary pizza joint. “You can tell by looking at a candidate’s eyes whether they’re weathering the fight well or whether it’s negatively impacting him,” Malone said. “He looked like he’d been through the wringer.” Malone remembered telling Romney to keep plugging away, that voters would give him a fair shot. “He goes, ‘I don’t know. What I’m hearing is these negative ads take their toll. And it sure does feel that way.’ ”
The Ampad episode taught Romney several lessons, some of which would inform his future adventures in politics. One, holding your fire when under attack is not an effective strategy. Two, the Kennedy political machine, whatever Kennedy’s weaknesses might have been, was still a dangerous thing to rouse. And three, it was difficult to go from being a CEO—accustomed to controlling information, operating in a quantitative climate, and calling the shots—to being a candidate in a high-wattage political campaign. Being a candidate also meant being handled, leaving certain decisions to the experts. “Letting go of that was really hard for him at first,” one former staffer said. Romney was, after all, a child of Detroit, descended from a long line of pragmatic, take-charge men. He liked to drive his own cars, change his own oil. He liked holding the reins. As the Ampad ads went up, Romney—along with his father—wanted to hit back hard and to respond in kind on TV. But the Washington consultants believed it would be a waste of money. “He felt almost powerless that he couldn’t make that decision,” the fomer aide recalled.
At the same time, Romney resisted pleas from others in the party to attack Kennedy on his personal life. “You’d get Republicans who would come up and say, ‘You gotta go at him on Chappaquiddick! You gotta go at him on his lifestyle!’ ” one former Romney aide said. It might have been an appealing idea to a man who believed that political leaders’ personal shortcomings threaten the nation’s values. But Romney would politely ignore the suggestions. It wasn’t his style, and, perhaps more important, it wasn’t something he thought would advance his campaign.
The race against Kennedy was, for Romney, his first opportunity to define himself in the public eye. From the beginning, his campaign made a deliberate effort to highlight his economic conservatism but present him as an acceptable choice on social issues to independents, wayward Democrats, and especially women. Mindful of Weld’s success in 1990 as a socially liberal Republican—and of Kennedy’s legacy as a defender of civil rights—Romney set out to prove that he would be as good as, or even better than, Kennedy in advancing those causes
in Congress. That moderate, nuanced political profile, akin to the one established by his father, seemed to be in his blood. But it was also a strategy conceived to win over the left-leaning state electorate. One Massachusetts Republican leader recalled a conversation with Charles Manning early on in which Manning said, “We’ve got this thing mapped out, and Mitt has bought into the idea that the key to victory here is that he’s a Bill Weld Republican.” No one, the thinking went, would be able to paint Romney as a right-winger. “That was really the foundation of the campaign,” the Republican said.
Romney’s willingness to embrace socially moderate, even liberal, positions—Romney himself preferred the term “socially innovative”—made him an attractive candidate for groups such as the Log Cabin Republicans, a grassroots GOP gay and lesbian organization. In September, as Romney was seeking the group’s endorsement, he sat down with Richard Tafel, the group’s founder, and a local leader, Mark Goshko, and received a primer on gay rights issues, from antidiscrimination legislation and the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy to the scourge of AIDS. Romney was deeply engaged, asked probing questions, and noted that he had gay employees at Bain. “I’d met with businessmen and politicians, and this felt like a business meeting. It felt much more pragmatic,” Tafel said. Romney’s approach was “What do I need to do here? How do I get this done?” One Massachusetts Republican who has known Romney for years summed up his approach this way: “In Mitt’s mind, it doesn’t matter what my positions are. I’m someone who solves problems.” Toward the end of the meeting, Romney turned to Tafel and said, “Now on the Boy Scouts, you wouldn’t want gay Scout leaders, would you?” Romney was on the executive board of the Boy Scouts, which banned homosexuals from participating. Tafel, who, as an openly gay appointee, had previously directed the state’s adolescent health program under Weld, explained why that question was offensive and why he believed the Scouts’ policy was so wrong. “I’m with you on this stuff,” Tafel recalled Romney saying. “I’ll be better than Ted Kennedy.”
The Log Cabin leaders told Romney they wanted his commitment in writing before the organization would make an endorsement. So not long afterward, Romney wrote a letter thanking the group for the meeting and asserting, “I am more convinced than ever before that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” Same-sex marriage was not on the table at that point, so he made no mention of it. Romney had previously said that, like Weld, he did not believe gay marriage was “appropriate at this time,” but he was willing to follow Weld’s lead. Romney, in the letter, did promise to cosponsor a federal employment nondiscrimination act to protect gays and lesbians in the workplace, expressed concern about suicides among gay and lesbian youth, and said he believed that “Don’t ask, don’t tell” was “the first in a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation’s military.” He continued, “That goal will only be reached when preventing discrimination against gays and lesbians is a mainstream concern, which is a goal we share.”
All this was music to the ears of the Log Cabin Republicans, who saw great value in having a high-profile Republican voice speaking out for their cause. Every indication was that Romney, like Weld before him, genuinely cared about gay rights and gay people. Even after the group endorsed Romney, his campaign would sometimes call and ask for guidance on things. A couple of years later, a gay man who had worked on Romney’s Senate bid, Eduardo Paez-Carrillo, was dying of AIDS. He was deeply touched by receiving a phone call from Romney.
Abortion burned even hotter as a front burner issue in 1994. Romney established himself as a passionate supporter of abortion rights early on in the campaign, despite his personal opposition to abortion. In fact, his professed views would grow more liberal over the course of the race. Romney initially said he opposed Medicaid funding for abortion. He later softened that position to say he favored leaving the question of coverage up to the states. Romney also endorsed the legalization of RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug, and appeared in June at a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood. Ann Romney gave the group $150.
Though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was firmly opposed to abortion in all but a few circumstances, Romney asserted that his family had supported a woman’s right to a safe, legal abortion ever since the October 1963 death of his brother-in-law’s sister, Ann Hartman Keenan, from complications following an illegal abortion. Keenan’s death—she was twenty-one—was devastating to her family and to the Romneys, with whom she was very close. “Ann was like a part of our family,” said Romney’s sister Jane. “Since that time, my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter,” Romney said in an October debate, pushing back against Kennedy’s charge that he was “multiple choice” on abortion. “And you will not see not see me wavering on that.”
It’s true that Lenore Romney had openly said during her 1970 Senate campaign that she supported the liberalizing of abortion laws. At the time—this was three years before the Supreme Court legalized abortion in its landmark Roe v. Wade decision—abortions were illegal in the state of Michigan. But it is overstating things to say, as Romney has since, that she truly “championed a woman’s right to choose.” In June 2005, Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara quoted two former Republican heavyweights close to Lenore’s Senate campaign, Elly Peterson and William Milliken, who said they had no memory of Lenore campaigning on abortion rights. Nor does David Plawecki, a twenty-two-year-old prolife Democrat running for the Michigan Senate that year against a Republican, N. Lorraine Beebe, who actively supported abortion rights. Abortion had been a defining issue in his own successful race, Plawecki said, but not in Lenore’s. “I cannot recall that being any part of her central theme at all,” he said. Lenore’s comments in a May 1970 story in the Owosso Argus-Press, a newspaper in Owosso, Michigan, perhaps best captured her ambivalence. Asked for her views on abortion, she was quoted as saying, “I think we need to reevaluate this, but do not feel it is as simple as having an appendectomy.” She went on to say, “I’m so tired of hearing the argument that a woman should have the final word on what happens to her own body. This is a life.”
As the 1994 race went on, voters had increasing difficulty discerning who Mitt Romney was. His outreach to social moderates was undermined by contrary things he was reported to have said in private settings. And as the race matured, his political definition—some amalgam of his core values, what his church taught, and what Massachusetts voters had come to expect from Republican hopefuls—never came into sharp relief.
That summer there was a report that Romney had told a Mormon gathering the previous fall that he was alarmed by reports of homosexuality in the congregation, denouncing it as “perverse.” Four people at the gathering confirmed what he had said, though Romney, who at the time of the alleged statements was president of the church’s Boston stake, denied making them. Then, in the fall, Romney acknowledged that as a Mormon leader he had counseled women not to have abortions except in rare instances where the church says they may be justifiable: rape, incest, if the mother’s life is at risk, or if the fetus has a severe abnormality. That revelation followed the anonymous account in Exponent II, the local Mormon feminist journal, by the mother who said Romney pressured her not to have an abortion, despite her precarious medical condition. Romney maintained throughout that he was representing the tenets of his church as a private citizen, which he said would have no bearing on his official duties as senator. Further muddying his pitch to moderates was an endorsement of sorts from a leader of Massachusetts Citizens for Life, an antiabortion organization. The rationale was simply that Romney would be better than Kennedy, even if only marginally. Romney’s campaign accepted the nod but quickly distanced itself from the group, saying it had never met with Massachusetts Citizens for Life or filled ou
t a questionnaire and that the organization had misrepresented his views.
Indeed, Romney was groping for a comfortable perch within the GOP. He pushed some reliably Republican themes, including requiring welfare recipients to work, cracking down on crime, and creating private-sector jobs. But he often strayed from the party plank as he sought to broaden his base of support. He supported raising the minimum wage and tying it to inflation, echoing Kennedy on one of the senator’s main causes and putting himself at odds with many business leaders. He rejected a national Republican proposal to trim the overall tax rate on capital gains. He backed two gun-control measures that were strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association: the Brady Law, which imposed a five-day waiting period on gun sales, and a ban on certain assault weapons, saying, “I think they will help.” Romney also discouraged the Christian Right from contributing money or airing anti-Kennedy ads on his behalf. And he distanced himself from the “Contract with America,” the political blueprint of Republican leaders in Washington, dismissing it as too partisan. “I’m not going to Washington to toe the line,” he said in one debate.
And then there were times when Romney was simply hard to pin down. He expressed lukewarm support for John Lakian’s proposal for a flat income tax. He was critical of federal spending but also questioned Kennedy’s effectiveness in bringing government dollars home to Massachusetts. Late in the race, Romney told an interviewer that he would have reluctantly voted for a universal health care plan pushed by John Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island. A linchpin of Chafee’s plan was a federal mandate that individuals buy health insurance, a principle that years later Romney would embrace on a statewide scale but vigorously oppose as national policy. “I told people exactly what I believed,” Romney said of the 1994 race. Kennedy, too, seemed to be moderating his views as the political sands shifted beneath him. He tried to retain his liberal credentials while keeping pace with a new, more centrist orientation in Democratic politics, represented, at times awkwardly, by President Bill Clinton. Kennedy came out for “workfare”—requiring able welfare recipients to find work in exchange for benefits—after rejecting similar bargains in the past. And he tried to cast himself as a crime fighter—a hard sell.
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