Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America

by Balz, Dan

  In his first campaign, he presented two faces to the country. The first was the Obama who sounded the call to turn the page on a poisonous chapter in its political history, to move beyond the old quarrels and transcend the politics of polarization. It was that Obama who struck such a chord, starting in 2004 and throughout his presidential campaign. Even Republicans were drawn to him, particularly in those flush days in early 2008. But he was also a candidate whose policy sympathies leaned distinctly toward liberalism, and his Senate voting record was among the most left-leaning in the chamber. He saw a role for government to attack and solve problems, though he managed to shade his proposals enough to leave room for different interpretations as to just where he stood ideologically. He could support a national health care bill but oppose an individual mandate, as he did in his first campaign. This was not an electoral pose. It was a trait evident in Obama much earlier. When the nuclear freeze movement arose while he was a student, he embraced nuclear nonproliferation and negotiations with the Soviets rather than the freeze. His first campaign for president was masterful for never having to square the circle between the aspirations of someone calling for a new politics and the one advocating ideas that might fit comfortably as part of the old liberal politics. In office, the questions persisted: Who was Obama? Was he the transcendent politician who talked about moving beyond red and blue America to find a new consensus, or was he actually a closet liberal with an agenda to extend government’s reach at every opportunity? The most conservative of Republicans believed they knew the answer. They thought he was a socialist. Liberals, however, were far from sure he was even a real liberal.

  One of the most thoughtful efforts to understand Obama’s worldview and intellectual underpinnings as a new president was a work published in 2011 by Harvard historian James T. Kloppenberg entitled Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition. Kloppenberg argued that Obama was difficult to decipher because people were trying to understand him through conventional lenses. “His approach to politics seems new only to those who lack his acquaintance with the venerable traditions of American democracy: respect for one’s opponents and a willingness to compromise with them,” he wrote. “His commitment to conciliation derives from his understanding that in a democracy all victories are incomplete. In his words, ‘no law is ever final, no battle truly finished,’ because any defeat can be redeemed and any triumph lost in the next vote. Building lasting support for policies and substantive changes is not the work of months or even years but decades.” Kloppenberg went on to write that Obama was steeped in the history of America but that he did not draw on the same things many Democrats had drawn on in the past. Obama’s thought process was a reflection of what Kloppenberg called “profound changes in American intellectual life” after Obama was born. “Obama’s ideas and his approach to American politics have thrown political observers off balance,” he wrote. “His books, his speeches and his political record make clear that he represents a hybrid of old and new, which explains why he puzzles so many contemporaries—supporters and critics alike—who see him through conventional and thus distorting lenses.” Kloppenberg’s analysis is based, as the title suggests, mostly on a careful reading of Obama’s writings and on some of the known history of him before he became president. As such, it was insightful but incomplete. Like many other people who watched Obama’s rise to the presidency, Kloppenberg was struck by the new leader’s seeming commitment to negotiation, conciliation, and compromise. He wrote, “Obama’s commitments to philosophical pragmatism and deliberative democracy—to building support slowly, gradually, through compromise and painstaking consensus building—represent a calculated risk as political strategy. It is a gamble he may lose. But it is not a sign of weakness, as his critics on the right and left allege. It shows instead that he understands not only the contingency of cultural values but also how the nation’s political system was designed to work. Democracy means struggling with differences, then achieving provisional agreements that immediately spark new disagreements. . . . His predilection to conciliate whenever possible is grounded in his understanding of the history of American thought, culture and politics.”

  In December 2008, I interviewed President-elect Obama at his transition headquarters in Chicago. I noted that he had announced his candidacy on the grounds of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln had given his famous “House Divided” speech, and would be following some of the same route Lincoln took as he made his way to Washington for his first inaugural. How did Lincoln inform his view of the presidency? I asked. Lincoln, he said, was his favorite president, though he did not want people to believe he was drawing an equivalency between himself and the sixteenth president. Then he offered a revealing window into his own thinking about leadership and power. “What I admire so deeply about Lincoln,” he said, “number one, I think he’s the quintessential American because he’s self-made. The way Alexander Hamilton was self-made or so many of our great iconic Americans are, that sense that you don’t accept limits, that you can shape your own destiny. That obviously has appeal to me given where I came from. That American spirit is one of the things that is most fundamental to me and I think he embodies that. But the second thing that I admire most in Lincoln is that there is just a deep-rooted honesty and empathy to the man that allowed him to always be able to see the other person’s point of view and always sought to find that truth that is in the gap between you and me. Right? That the truth is out there somewhere and I don’t fully possess it and you don’t fully possess it and our job then is to listen and learn and imagine enough to be able to get to that truth. If you look at his presidency, he never lost that. Most of our other great presidents, there was that sense of working the angles and bending other people to their will—FDR being the classic example. And Lincoln just found a way to shape public opinion and shape people around him and lead them and guide them without tricking them or bullying them, but just through the force of what I just talked about—that way of helping to illuminate the truth. I just find that to be a very compelling style of leadership. It’s not one that I’ve mastered, but I think that’s when leadership is at its best.”

  Someone who worked in the Obama White House during the first term made a related observation about Obama and Lincoln, which went to the question of both Obama’s ideology and his leadership style. He explained it this way: “His relationship with our left is no different than Lincoln’s relationship with the radical Republicans who thought that Lincoln was too cautious, that he wasn’t going for it in the Civil War, that he wasn’t doing the things that he really needed to do to win the Civil War, that he wasn’t moving fast enough on emancipation, that he was too cautious, that he was too this and too that. We look back in history and think of Lincoln as one of our great risk-taking, transformational presidents. But in the context of politics in his time he was seen as very much trying to stay in the middle.”

  Those who observed Obama from close in had other views about his ideology and leadership style. They said that whatever doubts the left might have about Obama, he was not a centrist in Bill Clinton’s mold (although by now the two agreed on most issues). Obama saw no particular virtue in planting his flag in the middle or in finding compromises that somehow split the differences between left and right. Triangulation for triangulation’s sake was not a strategy that interested him. He was, they believed, fundamentally progressive in his outlook, motivated most by social and economic justice, though more a cool rationalist than a bleeding heart. Obama himself resisted labels and characterizations. He objected when columnists suggested at different points in his presidency either that he was moving to the center or that he had found his inner populist. Obama saw consistency in his views and his approach.

  If he had a weakness, some of those who watched him closely said, it was for smart people, the belief that if you could just get enough smart people in a room, they could figure out a solution to whatever the problem was and
the public would accept it. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, upon leaving the administration, pointed to Vice President Joe Biden as one member of the administration who saw the limits of that approach: “I loved watching you, in briefings with the economic team, often in disbelief, saying, ‘Where did you people come from? And have you ever been exposed to the real world in any way?’” Democrats who knew both Obama and Clinton said Obama was less likely to change course simply because of the political risks involved. Compared with Clinton, however, he had less capacity to put himself in the minds of his opponents, to understand where they were coming from and why, or to channel their point of view as a way to figure out how to negotiate with them successfully.

  What was harder to decipher was just how expansive his vision for government action was or should be—particularly if he was reelected—and how the battles of his first years in office had shaped or changed that vision. As he prepared for the reelection campaign, the other question was whether he had lost some of his ability to connect with the voters. Was the disappointment that registered in the polls something that could be overcome with a vigorous campaign, or had too many people simply given up on him?

  • • •

  Mitt Romney was unknown in a more ordinary way. Though he had run for president in 2008, he left few deep impressions on the public. He had a glittering record of success, a résumé that was enviable in both the public and private sectors, and a huge personal fortune. What he lacked was a clear political identity. Was he a northeastern moderate, as he had appeared in his earliest incarnations as an office seeker? Was he a true conservative, as he had tried to present himself in his first campaign for the White House? Or was he a conservative of convenience, who saw changes in his own party and the constituencies he was trying to please and made the necessary adjustments, adapting in order to succeed?

  If there was a single influence on his life, it was his father, George Romney. The father had been born in Mexico in a Mormon colony, the child of a family that had fled the United States and then, when George Romney was five, would flee Mexico and return to the United States under threat from revolutionaries. George Romney was a powerful personality and a driven man who in the postwar years had risen through the ranks of the automobile industry to become chairman and CEO of American Motors Corporation. In 1962, he ran for governor of Michigan, after first asking his family whether he should run as a Democrat or a Republican. At the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he walked out in protest of Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. As the 1968 presidential campaign neared, he was considered a leading contender for the Republican nomination, but his candidacy proved to be short-lived, undone by a comment in which he said he had been “brainwashed” by the generals and others about the Vietnam War.

  Mitt was the youngest child in the family, and he developed a special and close relationship with his father. Mitt Romney was at his father’s side throughout his father’s rise in politics. He accompanied his father on the campaign trail, offered advice to his father when he was governor, and ached over his demise as a presidential candidate. Their personalities were different. His father was headstrong and outspoken, sometimes to a fault. Mitt Romney was more cautious and careful—and reserved. In their revealing biography The Real Romney, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman wrote, “A wall. A shell. A mask. There are many names for it, but many who have known or worked with Romney say the same thing: he carries himself as a man apart, a man who sometimes seems to be looking not in your eyes but past them. . . . Even some of Romney’s closest friends don’t always recognize the man they see from afar. This is a vexing rap to those in his inner circle—his wife, his family and his closest confidants. They see a different Mitt Romney. . . . The man they know is warm. He’s human. He’s silly. He’s funny, though sometimes his attempts at humor drift into corniness or just pure oddness. He’s deeply generous with both his time and his money when people need a lift.”

  Mitt Romney began his life in a comfortable neighborhood in Detroit, but the family moved when he was six to Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb. He attended the exclusive Cranbrook School, a private boys’ school, beginning in seventh grade. He went on to Stanford University, where he avoided the antiwar demonstrations and experimentation with drugs that were characteristic of his generation. Later he spent two years as a Mormon missionary in France. In 1969, he married Ann Davies, who converted to the Mormon faith, and they began building a family of five rambunctious sons. He simultaneously took degrees from Harvard’s law school and its business school. He joined Bain & Company, where he was an immediate star, and when the founder decided to form a new company, a private equity firm called Bain Capital, he recruited Romney to make it a success. The theory behind Bain Capital was that rather than simply offering consulting advice to troubled companies, the partners would also invest in them, sharing in the profits. Romney built his reputation as a shrewd technocrat who depended on careful analysis and deep number crunching to lead him to the right decisions. Every aspect of his life seemed grounded in dispassionate analysis. Kranish and Helman wrote that Romney once explained that “he preferred eating only the tops of muffins, so as to avoid the butter that melted and sank during baking.” Bain proved to be a major success story, and Romney became fabulously wealthy along the way. By the time he ran for president a second time, his net worth was estimated at more than $200 million.

  In 1994, Romney decided it was time to try the other part of the family business, politics, challenging Edward M. Kennedy for the Senate. Kennedy was an icon in the state but a senator who had not faced a serious opponent in his recent campaigns. The political climate was challenging for Kennedy, as it was for Democrats across the nation that fall. By early September, polls showed the race almost even. Romney, who had been a registered independent until 1993, was running as a moderate-to-liberal Republican. He was pro-choice on abortion, as was his mother, Lenore. He said at one point that he would do more than Kennedy to ensure rights for gay and lesbian Americans. He declined to endorse the Contract with America, the campaign manifesto put together by Newt Gingrich, who was leading the Republican effort to take control of the U.S. House. In the early fall, the Kennedy campaign launched a counterattack. Kennedy would turn Bain Capital into a negative on Romney’s résumé. The campaign aired a series of ads featuring angry workers who portrayed Bain as a rapacious company that had forced layoffs and reduced wages at their firm. The ads had a devastating effect and drove Romney’s poll numbers lower. The final blow came in their first debate, when a theatrical and sarcastic Kennedy demolished his Republican rival. It was in that debate that Kennedy charged that Romney was a clone of Ronald Reagan. “Look, I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush,” Romney replied, running away from his party. “I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.”

  In December 2011, the Post’s Philip Rucker and I interviewed Romney. We asked about that statement concerning Reagan and Bush and about his opposition to the Contract with America. “I applaud the fact that he was wise in crafting the Contract with America,” he said of Gingrich. “I didn’t think it was a very good political step. He was right; I was wrong. The Contract with America was a very effective political tool. I didn’t think it would be. It certainly was. I was, after all, in my first political race, and I learned not only from the wisdom of that contract, but also the wisdom of Ted Kennedy, who beat me soundly. And I have learned since that time, and I can tell you that over the years, my admiration and respect for the policies of Ronald Reagan has grown deeper and deeper.”

  After the loss to Kennedy, Romney returned to Bain. His next call to national service came in 1999, when he was asked to rescue the 2002 Winter Olympics, which were to be held in Salt Lake City.* The Salt Lake Organizing Committee had been hit with scandal over bribery and corruption. The winter games were short of funds and in deep trouble. Both the leaders of Salt Lake City and the state of Utah, along with much of the population,
were humiliated by the corruption that had infected the committee. Romney took on the challenge, and with the skills he had applied to failing companies at Bain he turned the games around. With that success, he again set his sights on political office, this time the governorship of Massachusetts.

  Romney’s gubernatorial campaign finally gave him the political victory that had eluded him eight years earlier in his challenge to Kennedy. He muscled aside a sitting Republican governor, won a subsequent primary, and defeated his Democratic rival to claim the office. He was sworn in as governor in January 2003. He had run as a businessman and an outsider who vowed that he would be a CEO governor. He brought the same style to government that he had practiced in business—sizing up problems, analyzing mounds of data, dissecting options, and finally settling on a course of action. Politically he was anything but a natural. Democrats in the state legislature found him standoffish and at times imperial in his approach. He inherited a sizable budget shortfall and moved swiftly to cut spending on a host of programs. But when spending cuts alone would not close the entire gap he turned to revenues, ending some loopholes and raising fees. He governed as a fiscal conservative, pressing a resistant legislature to cut taxes. But he was more successful in preventing any general tax increase than he was in enacting significant cuts. When he realized that Democrats would continue to block his agenda, he campaigned during the 2004 elections in an effort to boost Republican strength in the legislature. Instead, his party lost ground. His relations with the Democrats left the state polarized politically on most issues unless Democrats were motivated by self-interest to cooperate.