His tight grip paid off. Over seventeen days in February 2002, 2.1 billion people around the globe watched the competition, with the United States winning thirty-four medals, and representatives of nearly every nation expressing satisfaction with the event. In the end, Romney helped generate nearly a $100 million budget surplus and a trove of political goodwill for his next endeavor. “The people who say he is given too much credit for restoring the reputation of the Games,” David D’Alessandro said, “I don’t think they understand what he was up against.”
Ann Romney, after a difficult few years following her multiple sclerosis diagnosis, enjoyed a special lift. Before each Winter or Summer Games, a host country typically stages a torch relay, in which the Olympic flame is passed from runner to runner en route to its final destination in a stadium cauldron for the opening ceremonies. Many of the runners are everyday people—so-called personal heroes nominated for their courage, acts of charity, or some other attribute. Mitt nominated Ann in 2002, which afforded her the privilege of helping run the Olympic torch into Salt Lake City. “It was an amazing thing,” she would say years later, “to be too weak to barely walk when we got out there, and to be strong enough after three years, to have my children helping me to hold my arm up, and my husband was at my elbow, running with me and running the torch into Salt Lake City, as his hero.”
Had he been around to witness it, George Romney would have no doubt been proud at his youngest son’s achievement. It was a classic Romney project, and the son had been true to his name, in the land where his ancestors had overcome their own long odds a century before. Mitt Romney had helped to clear Brigham Young’s “great highway of the nations” for the kings and queens, presidents and nobles, elite athletes, and everyday people who converged on Salt Lake City. As a missionary, businessman, church leader, and friend, he had repaired many things in his life. None, however, had been nearly as big as this.
[ Nine ]
The CEO Governor
I don’t think that government is about doing favors for people. I think it’s doing the right thing for the folks we represent.
—MITT ROMNEY, 2007
A year before the torch was lit for the Winter Olympics, Mitt Romney’s leadership was already earning him mentions as a potential candidate for governor in two states. With his 1994 loss to Ted Kennedy now but a bad memory, Romney was eager to make another run at public office. But would he stay in Utah, where some pundits suggested his politics aligned more with the Democratic Party, or would he return home to try again in Massachusetts? As with other major decisions in his life, this one would not be driven by impulse, but by a careful strategic assessment of the political landscape. “If politics is part of the mix, which it may be,” Romney said at one point, “a lot of that depends on where the opportunity is.”
Friends and his former chief political adviser figured Romney was destined for Washington, for a cabinet or other high-level position under President George W. Bush. Speculation had also grown about a run in conservative Utah, however, after Romney objected to a July 2001 story in The Salt Lake Tribune describing him as “pro-choice” on abortion. “I do not wish to be labeled pro-choice,” he wrote in a letter to the editor. But later in 2001, a column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, citing sources close to Romney, suggested that he wanted a perch with enough national exposure to enable him to run for president. And Massachusetts was clearly the bigger launching pad. There was just one problem: Jane Swift, elevated to acting governor of Massachusetts when her boss, Paul Cellucci, had become U.S. ambassador to Canada, was preparing to anchor the GOP ticket in 2002. Romney had said there was little chance that he would challenge his fellow Republican.
Swift, though, was struggling politically. Panic-stricken Republicans feared losing the governorship, their only prize in the lopsidedly Democratic state. As one Republican town chairman put it at the time, “People are just sort of ready to jump ship and line up with somebody they think that can carry the ball in November.” Barbara Anderson, Massachusetts’s best-known antitax activist, recalled leaving this message on Romney’s answering machine: “I know you’re really busy now with the Olympics, but when you’re finished, please come back and save Massachusetts.” The state Republican Party’s new chairwoman, Kerry Healey, discreetly flew to Salt Lake City to gauge Romney’s intentions. He was noncommittal. Romney was telling other leading Republicans he wasn’t planning to run.
But then the Olympics went off with poignant beauty, and Romney was widely credited with rescuing the Games from financial ruin and scandal. “The guy looks like he walks on water,” Dan Jones, whose Utah poll registered Romney’s approval rating at 87 percent, said at the time. In Massachusetts, Romney commissioned his own poll, which showed he would be a viable candidate against any Democrat. His agents on the ground were quietly signing up staff and consultants and scheduling a formal announcement—whether Swift was in or out. One Massachusetts Republican close to Romney said that Romney had hated having to muscle Swift aside, but the allure of the job, and the pressure from party leaders, had been too great to resist. “It was clear Jane could not win. It was clear he could,” the Republican said. Romney never called Swift to say that he had changed his mind and would run for governor after all. Swift found out from her staff, which had gotten wind that Romney had rented a big hotel ballroom. This was consistent with what is, by several accounts, Romney’s aversion to confrontation if he can help it.
Ann Romney’s health was a factor in his decision to run. She said she had “huge qualms” about going back east, because her multiple sclerosis symptoms had abated during three years in Utah. “I’ve been healthy out here,” she said. But the next day, March 17, the Romneys, decked out in matching jackets with an Olympic theme, flew to Massachusetts. They were met at the airport by reporters and a fresh poll indicating that Romney would crush Swift in a race for the GOP nomination. Within forty-eight hours, Swift, the first woman to lead Massachusetts, pulled out of the race at an emotional press conference. The mother of three young children said it would be impossible to balance the demands of her family and her work as governor and fend off a primary fight from Romney. That afternoon, Romney was gracious toward Swift—he’d even canceled the big ballroom announcement for a more subdued kickoff. But he made clear that the race was now his. “Lest there be any doubt,” he told reporters gathered on the driveway of his Belmont home, “I’m in.”
The Mitt Romney who hit the campaign trail in 2002 was a different man from the political neophyte of 1994. He was, at fifty-five, now something of a media phenomenon—People magazine would soon name him one of the fifty Most Beautiful People in the World. With a high-profile public achievement now under his belt, he was that much more self-confident. After the bruising he had endured in his race against Senator Kennedy, he was wiser in the ways of politics, and as a result, he was tougher. Within days, his campaign produced television ads designed to preemptively beat back any Democratic attacks. It was a lesson learned from the Kennedy onslaught eight years earlier, which had typecast him as a heartless corporate raider. This time Romney would define himself, instead of letting his opponent do it for him. “I learned in my race against Senator Kennedy, don’t be so naïve as to just sit back and say, ‘Oh, I’m going to be positive while they’re negative,’ ” Romney told a TV interviewer. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Soon after jumping into the race, Romney deposited $75,000 in a new campaign account, the first installment of $6.3 million of his own money he would eventually spend on the campaign, then the most expensive in state history. But Romney’s money—he was now considerably wealthier than he’d been during the Senate race—was both an asset and a liability. His aides feared fresh criticism that he was out of touch with middle-class voters. They knew how effective that line of attack had been the last time around. Romney’s campaign was especially worried that another wealthy businessman—a former state GOP chairman named James Rappaport—might win the Republican primary for lieutenant
governor. Romney declared that he would remain neutral in the lieutenant governor’s race, but, as had happened with Swift, political necessity changed his mind. Robert White, his longtime wingman from Bain, and Michael Murphy, his chief political strategist, began working to avert a Romney-Rappaport ticket of two rich white men. After evaluating a list of potential alternatives, including African Americans and women, they settled on Kerry Healey, a bright but little-known figure who had two failed campaigns for state representative behind her and a wealthy husband who could neutralize Rappaport’s self-financed effort. Healey won the primary to become Romney’s running mate, but the expedience of their alliance was evident at the outset, when he called his new partner “Sherry” on a radio show.
During the same interview, Romney also displayed a weak grasp of Massachusetts politics, using the wrong first name of a past governor and misstating the hometown of a current Democratic candidate for the office. Listeners were perhaps willing to forgive him—he’d been away from the state for a few years, after all. But Democrats, sensing an opening, had other ideas. The Massachusetts Democratic Party launched a challenge to Romney’s eligibility for office, contending that his three years in Utah disqualified him from running. (The state constitution requires seven years of state residency before one can run for governor.) Romney was incensed. “Any effort to try to remove me by hook and crook and trick and legal machinations is going to end up failing,” he said.
Romney’s campaign initially insisted that he had filed income taxes as a resident of Massachusetts. Soon after, he acknowledged he had filed as a Utah resident for two years and had amended those tax returns, after announcing his candidacy, to show Massachusetts as his home. Over three days in June 2002, the State Ballot Law Commission heard evidence about his tax returns and the fact that the Romneys’ Utah home had been classified as his “primary residence,” giving him an $18,000 annual property-tax break. Romney attributed the mistakes to his accountant and the local tax assessor in Utah, who acknowledged the error under oath and, after the commission proceedings, sent him a new bill to recoup $54,587. But if the tax filings suggested that Romney was hedging his political bets, the evidence also showed that he had always maintained his Belmont voting address—choosing George W. Bush over John McCain in the 2000 Republican presidential primary, he would say later—and had returned from Utah for special occasions, maintaining ties to Bay State boards and organizations. The ballot commission, deeming Romney’s testimony “credible in all respects,” rejected the Democrats’ challenge in a unanimous forty-one-page decision.
The residency fight proved to be a good tune-up for the race against his Democratic opponent, Shannon P. O’Brien, a feisty Yale-educated former legislator and the state‘s first female treasurer. Her family had been active in Massachusetts politics for four generations. She had won a rugged four-way primary but drained her campaign account in the process. At the outset, she was the aggressor, attacking Romney incessantly on trustworthiness and needling him on issues where he seemed vulnerable. As Kennedy had in 1994, O’Brien homed in on abortion, hoping to exploit uncertainty about Romney’s position and undercut his appeal to women and independent voters. It was hardly a pressing issue at the statehouse, and O’Brien herself had opposed abortion in a previous political campaign. But as a litmus test, it seemed to hold promise, and O’Brien’s campaign knew it.
“My position has not changed.” It was an unusually defensive assertion for a convention speech, but Romney felt obliged to make it. He was speaking to a Massachusetts Republican Party gathering that April. But he was also addressing a broader concern: growing doubts about his views on key social issues. Romney’s assertion signaled that he was the same man who had run against Kennedy, a fiscal conservative with moderate views on issues such as abortion, gay rights, guns, and the environment. But there were confusing signals, too, and Romney was again forced to persuade a skeptical electorate of where his heart truly lay. His 2001 letter to the editor in the Utah newspaper, in which he said he no longer wanted to be considered prochoice, was one source of political friction, leading opinion makers and abortion rights advocates to question his stance. Romney sought to answer those questions definitively at the convention, declaring, “I respect and will fully protect a woman’s right to choose. That choice is a deeply personal one, and the women of our state should make it based on their beliefs, not mine and not the government’s.” Ann Romney also tried to assuage the concerns of women voters, saying in a joint TV interview, “I think [they] may be more nervous about him on social issues. They shouldn’t be, because he’s going to be just fine.” Mitt cut in and said that when he’s asked whether he will “preserve and protect” a woman’s right to abortion, “I make an unequivocal answer: yes.”
His answers to an April 2002 questionnaire from the local NARAL chapter were similarly unequivocal. Romney said he would oppose attempts to change state law, either by adding new restrictions on abortion or by easing existing ones. He expressed support for Medicaid funding for the procedure, efforts to expand access to emergency contraception, and the restoration of state funding for family-planning and teen pregnancy prevention programs. He also said he supported comprehensive sex education in public schools and would oppose “‘abstinence-only’ sexuality education programs.” “The truth is, no candidate in the governor’s race in either party would deny women abortion rights,” he wrote. “So let’s end an argument that does not exist and stop the cynical, divisive attacks made only for political gain.”
Later that year, Romney picked up the endorsement of the Republican Pro-Choice Coalition, a group that backed GOP candidates nationwide who supported abortion rights. “We applaud your commitment to family planning and protecting a woman’s right to choose,” the group’s national director wrote Romney in October. “You set a wonderful example.” On flyers Romney printed to court women voters, the first bullet point assured them that he had “promised to protect a woman’s right to choose.”
But abortion, although an ideological barometer, was not really much of a focus for state politicians. The bigger culture battles in 2002 were being fought over gay rights. The political landscape had shifted following Vermont’s pioneering decision in 2000 to legalize civil unions. The decision spooked gay marriage opponents in Massachusetts, who organized a push for a constitutional amendment restricting marriage to heterosexual unions. Ann and Tagg Romney alarmed Romney’s gay supporters—the many he’d won over in his 1994 campaign—by signing a petition to put the question on the election ballot. But Romney quickly distanced himself from his family’s decision, saying he did not support the proposed ban. The proposal, which later died, would also have withheld domestic-partner benefits such as bereavement leave and health care coverage from the gay and lesbian partners of public employees.
Romney did not support same-sex marriage, declaring in a 2002 questionnaire for Bay Windows, New England’s leading gay and lesbian newspaper, “I believe that marriage is a union between a man and a woman.” He also said he opposed civil unions, believing they were too close to marriage. But at the same time, he was assuring gays and lesbians—publicly and privately—that he would not crusade against them. Plus he was voicing support for domestic partner benefits that sounded an awful lot like civil unions. Richard Babson, a board member of the state chapter of the Log Cabin Republicans, the Republican gay rights advocacy group, recalled an event at a bar in Boston’s Bay Village neighborhood where Romney spoke to gay voters. Babson came away from the meeting—and a more intimate question-and-answer session that immediately followed—believing Romney to be reasonably progressive. “He said, ‘I support everything that it calls for in terms of recognizing unions between people. But just don’t use the M-word,’ ” Babson recalled.
In addition, Romney said, as he had in 1994, that he would be especially effective as a Republican voice supportive of gay rights, and he vowed to use his bully pulpit to stand up to the powerful, culturally conservative Democratic House speak
er, Thomas Finneran. At Boston’s gay pride parade his campaign distributed pink flyers that said, “Mitt and Kerry Wish You a Great Pride Weekend! All citizens deserve equal rights, regardless of their sexual preference.” On the Bay Windows questionnaire, he expressed support for strengthening laws against hate crimes and expanding funding for AIDS treatment and prevention and said he would look to both “protect already established rights and extend basic civil rights to domestic partnerships.” All in all, he was again sending signals that, though he wasn’t willing to go as far as endorsing marriage, he was sympathetic to gay rights and would advance the cause once in office. As it had in 1994, that stance earned him the endorsement of the Log Cabin Republicans.
In the closing weeks of the race, Romney sat down for a private meeting with Bill Saltonstall, a former Republican state senator whose family had helped establish the Massachusetts brand of socially moderate Republicanism. Saltonstall had a gay daughter living in Alaska with adopted children and wanted assurance from Romney that his assertions on gay rights came from the heart. Romney, according to one participant in the meeting, assured Saltonstall that he would promote tolerance and fight discrimination. He also, according to the participant, proposed a thorough review of state laws to see where lifelong gay and lesbian relationships were negatively affected, and how the state could change its practices to make them nondiscriminatory. Saltonstall’s mind, for the moment, was eased.
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