It had all started with him marveling at American innovation, still in many ways a Detroit boy who hasn’t lost his sense of wonder at the latest invention, gadget, and late-model car, still drawn to the creative alchemy that is technological advancement. “I can take a blooming picture with my phone!” he says, sounding just like the young Mitt might have years before, at his father’s side, surveying the latest automotive prototype with wide eyes.
Today, he’s a long way from Detroit, more than six decades on the road and still traveling. And he is still finding his way. He got close to his ultimate goal four years ago, before he was forced to fall in line behind John McCain, putting a bitter rivalry aside. Indeed, their makeup press conference at Romney’s campaign headquarters in Boston was as awkward as they come. But to Romney failure became just another hurdle to mount. It didn’t take him long to start trying again.
Mitt Romney hadn’t been anyone’s number two since the earliest days of his business career—and then not for long. But after bowing out of the 2008 race, that was the job he was gunning for. It was also the only one open. His hope was to salvage his first national campaign by becoming McCain’s chosen running mate and, if that didn’t work out, put himself in position to make another run. In his trademark analytical way, he embarked on the courtship as if it were one more primary, this time with the goal of gaining not voters’ approval but McCain’s. He shook off the pain of defeat, or at least put it out of mind, and set off to campaign hard for the man who had vanquished him.
Romney barnstormed from state to state as a McCain surrogate and headlined fund-raisers for the chronically cash-poor candidate. He earned praise as the ultimate good scout, a man who put helping his party above nursing his wounded pride. And McCain took notice. “I had every confidence of his loyalty,” McCain said. “Anytime anybody asked him to do something anywhere for our campaign, Mitt did it.”
As McCain pondered his running-mate options, Romney was in the mix and at times leading the short list. He was, to many McCain aides, clearly the most accomplished and qualified of the names in contention, but “accomplished” and “qualified” were not necessarily what the Arizona senator was looking for. McCain, who was running way behind in the polls, felt pressed to consider an unorthodox choice, a surprise, someone who could shake things up and wrest the mantle of change from Barack Obama. McCain was also determined to run with someone with whom he felt personally comfortable. The fact was that he and Romney, though they had been campaign rivals for months, barely knew each other. The question of whether to go with a bold choice instead would require further pondering on McCain’s part. But closing the personal gap between the two men could be dealt with straightaway.
And so, in May 2008, a few months after Romney pulled out of the presidential race, he and Ann climbed into a white Ford Mustang and drove toward the canyons around Sedona, Arizona. He was still frustrated at having squandered his chance with a flawed campaign strategy, a fractured staff, and his own uneven performance as a candidate. But now was not the time for self-criticism; it was time to sell himself anew. Along with other prospective candidates, Romney had been invited to spend a weekend at McCain’s ranch. There McCain could take his measure of Romney on friendly territory, at his own pace, as they barbecued, walked to the creek, and hiked around the area’s breathtaking Red Rocks.
To break whatever tension still lingered, McCain invited the Romneys to join his family at one of his favorite hangouts, a restaurant in Jerome, an old, spooky mining town thirty miles away in the high desert. It was a historic Spanish Mission–style venue, once a hospital and psychiatric ward for miners. Now it was an upscale eatery called The Asylum. The McCains and the Romneys settled into their seats, taking in the sweeping views of the Verde Valley. McCain soon found himself seeing the man across the table in a way he never had. “I’d always gotten the impression during the campaign that he was a little stiff,” McCain said. “As I got to know him and his family,” he said, he found “that’s just not the case. In informal settings, he’s a very talkative, entertaining guy with lots of experiences.”
They were opposites in many ways: the disciplined, straitlaced Romney, who didn’t swear or drink, and the fiery, tempestuous McCain, a former navy man who’d seen a bit more of life. But there in Arizona, they found something in common. There was history, for one. Both had family ties to the state. And they shared something else: both had struggled to step out of, and beyond, a paternal shadow. McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, and Romney, the son of a governor, had both grown up with the highest of expectations. Gradually, to the surprise of aides in both camps, “Mitt and I became friends,” McCain said. “I think Mitt is one of those guys, certainly was in my case, the better I got to know him, the better I liked him.”
After the trip to Arizona, Romney remained a top prospect to be McCain’s running mate, acknowledging that he would be “honored” if McCain picked him. McCain aides were asked to list pluses and minuses of various candidates, and Romney inevitably came up with a passel of pluses: competency, conservatism, the ability to raise money. But some McCain aides emphasized the minuses. Romney had been a success in business, yes, but sometimes at the expense of workers. Many of his deals had left “blood on the floor,” as the aides put it, and that might be hard to explain to voters. And then there was his image as something of a weather vane on social issues. One of the McCain aides, who had never gotten over Romney’s gibes at McCain during the primaries, made an argument that a fellow adviser summed up this way: “This is a Massachusetts flip-flopper potentially being coupled with the unflinching man of honor, and the two brands don’t add up.”
Romney’s supporters in McCain’s inner circle continued to push for their man, and Romney was thoroughly vetted by the team of lawyers McCain hired to evaluate potential picks. But McCain began to focus harder on making an unconventional pick. His pollster Bill McInturff told him that more than two-thirds of the public thought the country was on the “wrong track” and that the majority of such people would vote for the Democratic nominee. Given those numbers, McInturff told McCain, “There is no precedent in American political history, post–World War II, for the Republican nominee to win.” McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, was equally grim, telling McCain, “If we don’t do anything that significantly mixes it up, you’re going to lose.”
McCain took the advice, looking past Romney’s attributes to abruptly choose a little-known but promising Alaska governor named Sarah Palin. McCain wanted a game changer who could rally the Republican base, siphon support from women voters who had backed Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination, and draw attention away from Obama, whose appealing backstory as a black man of Kenyan-Kansan heritage bathed his campaign in historical significance. The moment McCain settled on the rambunctious, youthful Palin, Mitt Romney’s campaign year was over. It was time to go home.
It was early February 2011, and Romney had just arrived at an upscale Washington restaurant for a private meeting with one of the nation’s most influential evangelicals. Across the table sat Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. It felt, in many ways, like a reprise of four years earlier, when Land had flown to Boston and met Romney at his home to discuss campaign strategy. Land was among many who had counseled Romney to court social conservatives, and now he prepared to make the pitch again, but this time in a different economic and political climate.
Romney and Land, along with a few others, settled into a booth at the Acadiana restaurant and ordered plates of Louisiana cuisine. Land offered his take on the political landscape. He saw advantages for Romney in a U.S. economy still staggering out of a deep recession, and he saw risk for him in the controversial health plan he had pushed into law in Massachusetts. But Land’s key message was that Romney should not be swayed by those who were now advising him to downplay his positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, and other social issues. That would be a fat
al mistake, he said, because the Tea Party movement, still ascendant within the GOP, had zeroed in on downscaling government but included many who cared deeply about social issues.
But this wasn’t 2008, and Romney’s response to Land’s counsel showed how much the candidate had changed. He thanked Land for his advice without saying how much of it he would take. Some months later, the answer seemed clear: Romney kicked off his campaign by focusing heavily on fixing the economy. He did not mention abortion in his announcement speech. Even when speaking to a faith-based group the day after his kickoff, he mentioned abortion in a sentence and quickly moved to more comfortable terrain: kick-starting the U.S. economy. It was a striking change and intended as one.
In the aftermath of 2008, Romney closely analyzed his campaign, talking through the failure with his closest advisers. True to form, he wallowed in the data, crunched the numbers, and evaluated the results thoroughly. Several things had gone wrong. His message had been muddled. He had spent far too much time and money in Iowa. He had miscalculated his popularity in New Hampshire. He’d relied too heavily on expectations about how his competitors would fare. Romney, admitting the limits of his own political instincts, also seemed particularly rueful, two advisers said, at not having had a campaign architect such as Mike Murphy, who had stayed out of the 2008 race because of his ties to McCain. “I never had a strategist,” Romney told his friends. “I had all the pieces of the puzzle but didn’t fit them together.” He had needed a team he could trust implicitly, a key ingredient in his success at many points in his life and career. In 2008, his team had been divided. Some advisers insisted that Romney thrived in that environment, refereeing the collision of ideas and making the end call as the CEO. But the lesson of 2008 seemed to be that running a presidential campaign, with its compressed time frame and unpredictable currents, is nothing like leading a state, helming the Olympics, or buying and selling companies.
Looking ahead to 2012, Romney concluded that he needed a different kind of campaign. He looked again to his close circle of advisers in Boston, who had learned from their mistakes and grown and changed in the intervening years. One group had helped Republican Scott Brown achieve a stunning victory, winning the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Ted Kennedy. Another group had played a key role in midterm election victories by Republicans across the country. In preparation for the second try, Stuart Stevens, who came with years of experience in presidential campaigns, moved to Boston and was empowered as chief strategist. The two bickering media teams of 2008 were reduced to one. After spending $2 million to win Iowa’s straw poll in 2007, Romney would refuse to participate four years later. Instead of spending millions of dollars on early campaign ads, he would hoard his campaign cash. And rather than devoting countless hours to wooing evangelical leaders, he would say that the time for discussing his religion had come and gone. Read Article VI of the Constitution, he would say, quoting it: “No religious test.”
In a frank admission, Romney acknowledged that his major mistake in 2008 had been quite simple: he had failed to get across what he was really all about, a problem he had also identified after his 1994 Senate race. Once again, he had lacked definition. “I think that one of the things that’s very important in running a campaign is to make sure that you’re known for the things that really motivate you,” he said. “And I needed to do a better job to focus my campaign on the economy and getting the economy right and creating jobs. And whether through my ads or through my responses to debate questions or on the stump, my power alley is the economy.”
This time, his aides said, Romney would play to his strengths every possible minute. It would be a calculated risk, though. He still had no strong foreign policy credentials. Social issues would remain important to many in the Republican base. Conservatives disliked his Massachusetts health care plan, notwithstanding his promise to repeal “Obamacare” if elected president. And his career as a leveraged-buyout specialist could backfire if voters still saw him as more in tune with Wall Street than with the squeezed middle class. But if the economy remained the dominant issue, then perhaps, just perhaps, he and his team thought, the pieces of the puzzle might fit.
Before making the leap in 2012, Romney first consulted with Ann, as he had always done. She told him that he should go for it, and without regret. He also wrote a book, No Apology, that revealed little about himself or his family but was filled with policy prescriptions that, like campaign white papers, provided a sketch of his conservative principles. With so many people asking where he really stood, Romney now had something concrete that he could show. It’s in the book, he’d say. Just read it.
It’s telling, though, what Romney didn’t emphasize. No Apology concluded with a list of sixty-four “action steps” that formed what he called his “agenda for a free and strong America.” There is no mention of abortion or same-sex marriage on the list, although he did make room for recommendations such as “Adopt dynamic regulations.” In the text of the 309-page book, he only briefly referenced his “unapologetically pro-life” stance and his “opposition to same-sex marriage.” Asked why he put so little emphasis on social issues, which had played such a significant role in his 2008 campaign, he responded blandly, “It’s always a great interest on the part of those questioning a candidate to know where they stand on social issues, but I don’t know it’s a topic that’s going to be resolved with rhetoric and analysis. It’s rather a topic where one has one view or one has the other view and you’re not going to persuade someone.” In other words, that wasn’t a battle he planned to wage this time around.
On April 12, 2011, Romney entered the Harvard Club in New York City, which advertises itself as “the city’s most exclusive private club,” and appeared before more than a hundred of the country’s most powerful and wealthy Republicans. Most in the audience had pledged to raise a minimum of $25,000 from their friends, and many were expected to raise much more. They included Wall Street traders, executives, and others who liked Romney’s business background and applauded his approach to economic issues. With their help, Romney told the gathering, he could raise tens of millions of dollars and be on the road to the White House. The gathering underscored Romney’s decision not to distance himself from Wall Street and the business world. At the same time, he kept a distance from some elements of the Tea Party. He praised the Tea Party’s concerns about big government and endorsed some of its candidates but also said that voters should be wary of the “temptations of populism.” “The populism I’m referring to is, if you will, demonizing certain members of society: going after businesspeople, going after Wall Street, going after people who are highly educated, people who are CEOs,” he said. “That kind of ‘all of our problems are due to that group’ is something that is unproductive.”
There was no doubt that Romney was, to some degree, speaking in self-defense, given his long ties to Wall Street and the investment community and his two Harvard degrees. At the same time, he began making a better effort to connect with regular people. In the 2008 campaign, his staff had argued with a Florida adviser who wanted the candidate to take off his tie when meeting with retirees. In this campaign, as he prepared for an interview by Piers Morgan on CNN, Romney solicited his wife’s advice. “I’m going to be on with Piers today, what should I wear? I think I should wear a tie, don’t you?” Ann replied, “No, no, no. Just wear the shirt you’ve got on, a blue shirt, and a sports coat.” As Romney said in recounting the exchange, “I do as I’m commanded.” And in fact, Romney has often adopted the business casual look, tieless and in simple slacks and a shirt. Sometimes he even pulls out the jeans (alternating between the fashionable Gap 1969 variety and a pair of Levi’s 514s). In 2008, his press spokesman criticized rival Mike Huckabee for inviting photographers to watch Huckabee get a trim at an Iowa barbershop. This time, Romney invited photographers to watch him get a $16 cut, posting on his Twitter account afterward, “Just got a Trim at Tommy’s in Atlanta.”
But the effort to recalibrate his image c
ould come off awkwardly. In August, Romney climbed atop bales of hay at the Iowa State Fair and, per tradition, began hawking his message like a carnival barker. Facing a crowd that included a number of hecklers, he argued against raising taxes as a way of saving Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Someone in the crowd yelled, “Corporations!” Romney took the bait. “Corporations are people, my friend,” he said. “No, they’re not!” a heckler shouted. “Of course they are,” Romney responded. “Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.” The comment, which drew catcalls from the Left, was fully in harmony with Romney’s convictions about how capitalism works to benefit all. The phrasing seemed impolitic for a man trying to broaden his appeal to working-class voters, but he stood by the remark.
When he ran the 2002 Olympics, Romney came up with a vision for the Games: “Light the Fire Within.” It was intended as a celebration of persistence and inner strength. In retrospect, it can be read as a guiding principle for Romney’s life; he has never lacked for drive. Not as the teenager who stumbled to the finish line in the race at Cranbrook. Or the missionary whose trials pushed him nearer to his faith. Or the son who spent so many years trying to match and exceed the ambitions of his dad. Or the businessman who pushed and pushed until the deals made sense. Or the governor who followed his own compass to achieve a historic breakthrough on health care.
Romney, indeed, has always had persistence, always had ambition and exceptional stamina. What he has struggled with, in politics, is exactly who he is, with decoding his political DNA. For years, he could just operate in his father’s shadow or avoid those hard questions in the private sector, getting by on brains and leadership alone. But if, as he said, his die was now cast—if he had settled on a true sense of self—he would have to prove it and stick to it under the hot glare of a presidential campaign. And sticking to one vision of what he is about has always been the hardest thing for Mitt Romney.
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