Almost President

by Scott Farris

  Addendum

  MITT ROMNEY

  2012

  I have “concepts” that I believe.

  On Election Day 2012, Mitt Romney made it known that he had not bothered to write a presidential concession speech, only a victory speech. So when Barack Obama won convincingly, and with the result known relatively early in the evening, Romney, whom aides described as “shell shocked,” had little time to prepare remarks for what would be one of the most important speeches of his public life.

  As noted in chapter 1, a concession speech is the last opportunity for a losing presidential candidate to have the full attention of the nation. The defeated candidate typically uses the platform to sum up the meaning of his campaign and define his political legacy. Romney spent most of his address thanking his family and staff for their hard work. His concession came across as perfunctory—not ungracious, but hardly among the best of a genre that can inspire either newfound admiration or even buyer’s remorse among the listening audience.

  Whether Romney had truly failed to prepare a concession out of bravado or superstition, his speech was more than a missed opportunity; absent a declaration of his campaign’s underlying meaning, it fed a perception, particularly within Republican ranks, that Romney’s campaign had been about nothing.

  This perceived emptiness was particularly bitter for conservatives, who had hopes that 2012 would be a consequential election fought along sharply ideological lines. Republicans considered Obama’s initial election in 2008 a fluke, an instance where the nation was temporarily mesmerized by the historic significance of electing the first African-American president. Instead, Obama earned a second term by a comfortable 51–47 percent margin in the popular vote and with 332 electoral votes to Romney’s 206.1

  History will determine just how consequential the 2012 results turn out to be (and Barry Goldwater and George McGovern stand as reminders that judgment should not come too quickly), but Romney’s candidacy had historic elements. Romney, after all, was the first member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (more popularly known as “Mormonism”) to be nominated for president. Given that a significant number of Americans do not consider Mormonism a Christian religion—and some consider it a cult—the 2012 Republican campaign was a milestone in the American tradition of religious pluralism and tolerance.2

  Romney, who had risen to the rank of bishop in the lay ministry that is a feature of Mormonism, had feared he might fall victim to the bigotry Al Smith had faced in 1928 as the first Roman Catholic nominee for president. It didn’t happen. Romney’s religion was little discussed during the campaign, and post-election surveys indicated religion had not been a factor in shaping the election results. Romney’s candidacy was made even more remarkable when he chose as his running mate a Roman Catholic, Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, meaning Romney-Ryan was the first presidential ticket in American history without a Protestant member.3

  Romney’s candidacy, while religiously historic, also provided further evidence of the pitfalls facing a businessman running for president. As noted in the earlier chapter on Ross Perot, Americans tend to be skeptical that business skills and successes are transferable to the world of politics. Only once had a man of business, Wendell Willkie in 1940, been nominated by a major party for president without having held any elected office, and Willkie won the nomination primarily on the basis of his foreign policy views! Romney was a former governor, but except for Willkie and Perot, no previous presidential candidate had so stressed experience in business as a qualification for the White House.

  Perhaps the wealthiest man ever nominated for president, with a net worth of $250 million or more, Romney raised eyebrows when released tax returns revealed that he held accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, traditional havens for tax avoidance. And because most of his income was earned from investments and capital gains, he paid an effective tax rate of less than 14 percent, a lower rate than that paid by many Americans of average means.

  Romney’s wealth was not an asset in 2012. Banks, Wall Street, and financiers of all stripes bore a considerable part of the blame in the public mind for the 2008 financial collapse that led to what was labeled the “Great Recession,” and income inequality was a growing national concern that led to the nebulous but troublesome “Occupy Wall Street” movement. Obama had made raising tax rates on the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans the centerpiece of his reelection campaign, while Romney proposed broad-based tax cuts that critics said disproportionately benefited the wealthy. How Romney had accumulated his wealth also became an issue. Romney claimed his work leading a private equity firm, Bain Capital, gave him expertise in job creation, but sometimes Bain’s investments led to business failures and job losses.

  Yet Romney’s unique place among presidential candidates as a Mormon and wealthy businessman was not why many observers believed that 2012 should have been a consequential election. Rather, conservatives particularly hoped that 2012 would resolve whether social welfare programs from the Great Society and even the New Deal would be rolled back in a renewed enthusiasm for limited government, or whether, in their view, the country would continue to move to the left politically.

  Partly reflecting the party realignment that had begun with Goldwater’s 1964 candidacy and that was aided by McGovern’s 1972 campaign, the nation seemed badly divided in 2012. In terms of partisan identification, America had not been so evenly split since the late nineteenth century. And by some measures, the nation, fed by an increasingly partisan news media, had never been so politically polarized.

  The Republican Party was no longer just essentially a conservative party; it had evolved into an exclusively conservative party. The Tea Party movement, credited with energizing conservatives to a degree that allowed Republicans to sweep the 2010 midterm elections and regain control of the House, had made as one of its key goals the purging of liberals and moderates from the GOP. Long-serving Republican members of Congress whose conservative credentials had never been in question before, such as Utah Senator Bob Bennett and Indiana Senator Richard Lugar, were now described as “RINOs”—“Republicans In Name Only”—and were defeated in Republican primaries by opponents even further to the political right.

  Republicans countered that Obama was moving the nation dramatically to the left with the goal of creating European-style socialism in America. Their evidence was congressional approval, without any Republican support, of the Affordable Care Act (more popularly known as “Obamacare”)—the single most important expansion of a federal entitlement program since the creation of Medicare in 1964.

  Obamacare advanced the long-held liberal goal of universal health insurance coverage for all Americans. While some components were widely popular, such as prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage because of a pre-existing condition, universal coverage was achieved by a controversial mandate that required individuals who could afford it to purchase health insurance or pay a fine. Democrats responded to GOP outcries by claiming that they were not moving to the left so much as Republicans kept moving to the right, noting that the mandate was an idea once championed by conservatives.

  One Republican who had supported the mandate in the past was Romney. Indeed, he had pioneered it as public policy in pushing for universal health insurance coverage while governor of Massachusetts. As was repeatedly noted by Obama and the Democrats, Obamacare was modeled largely off the Massachusetts experiment, which by early accounts was performing extremely well. Romney argued that what worked in Massachusetts should not necessarily be applied federally and he vowed to repeal Obamacare if elected. His was an awkward position. Romney was a candidate unable to boast about his great signature achievement as governor of Massachusetts.

  With Romney appeasing his party by attacking Obamacare, conservatives hoped he would make 2012 a battle of “big ideas.” They were encouraged when Romney selected the forty-two-year-old Ryan, the ch
air of the House Budget Committee, to be his vice presidential nominee. Ryan had put forth a budget wildly popular in conservative circles, one that envisioned deep tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, and a dramatic change in federal entitlements. Medicare as a federal insurance program, for example, would be replaced with vouchers issued to retirees, who would use them to purchase private insurance in a competitive market.

  But Ryan’s budget only inspired ambiguity from Romney. At one point early in the campaign, he endorsed it, but after selecting Ryan as his running mate Romney declined to embrace it fully. Conservatives saw it as another maddening example of Romney avoiding specifics in the hope that bland generalities such as “I believe in America,” sometimes followed or preceded by Romney singing “America the Beautiful,” would suffice to persuade voters that Obama had not earned a second term. They wanted the election to offer a clear and hard choice with the expectation that voters would choose conservative principles.

  Obama, too, seldom offered clear prescriptions to address the nation’s many challenges. Because fewer than ten states were really up for grabs in the election, both Romney and Obama used their vast campaign funds to micro-target voters in those handful of battleground states. The 2012 contest never felt like a truly national election.

  Romney’s failure to define clearly the foundational principles of his campaign, during and after the election, was particularly remarkable given that Romney had said his greatest regret from his first political foray, his 1994 defeat in his race for the U.S. Senate against Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, was that no one could easily sum up why he had run for office. A friend recalled Romney saying at the time, “After all the weeks and months of that campaign, if you ask, ‘Why did Mitt Romney run for the U.S. Senate, and what did he stand for?’ most people had no clue.”

  After the presidential campaign, Mitt Romney’s advisers acknowledged that his choice of Paul Ryan as running mate was not meant to signal an ideological campaign strategy. Rather, he was chosen for the personal chemistry Romney felt with the congressman, who was the same age as Romney’s oldest son. Perhaps the trait the two men shared most was the simple love of numbers.

  “I love data,” Romney told the Wall Street Journal editorial board during his first presidential run in 2008. “I used to call it ‘wallowing in the data.’ . . . I want to see all the data.” When bemused Journal editors pressed Romney about whether such an objective approach could work in an ideologically divided age, Romney insisted that he was not devoid of a political philosophy. “I have ‘concepts’ that I believe,” he said. Such a seemingly disinterested approach to politics led many people, even friends and confidants, to question whether Romney had any core beliefs, or was simply an opportunist ready to take any position to close a deal.

  Washington Post columnist Ezra Klein argued that this characterization, if not unfair, was at least incomplete. “What Romney values most is something most of us don’t think much about: management,” Klein wrote. “A lifetime of data has proven to him that he’s extraordinarily, even uniquely, good at managing and leading organizations, projects and people. It’s those skills, rather than specific policy ideas, that he sees as his unique contribution.”

  Klein might have added that Romney also saw it as his inheritance, for his father, George Romney, had used his own reputation as a brilliant manager as head of the American Motors Corporation (AMC) to later win three terms as governor of Michigan, mount a serious presidential bid, and serve in Richard Nixon’s Cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.4

  Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two Boston Globe reporters who wrote an excellent biography of Romney, The Real Romney, quoted a family friend who said Romney’s “whole life was following a pattern which had been laid out by his dad.”5 Romney once revealed that he had received the following advice from his father: “Don’t get into politics as your profession. . . . Get into the world of the real economy. And if someday you’re able to make a contribution, do it.”

  Willard Mitt Romney was born in Detroit, Michigan, on March 12, 1947, the youngest of four children in the Romney household.6 The Romneys had been devout and prominent members of the LDS faith since a family ancestor became one of the first Mormon converts in England in 1837 and emigrated to America.

  George Romney first gained national prominence when he saved the AMC from insolvency by developing the compact, affordable, and fuel-efficient Rambler when the rest of Detroit was building bigger and bigger land yachts. The elder Romney was also renowned for being the rare CEO to refuse raises and bonuses if he felt his performance had not warranted additional compensation. Given his position with AMC, Romney was often involved in Michigan and Detroit politics, such as leading an effort to improve the city’s schools. His family was unsurprised when he announced in 1962 that he had decided to run for governor. He had only one question for his wife and children: “Should I run as a Republican or a Democrat?”

  He ran and won as a Republican, but that he even asked the question was a sign that Romney was not fully attuned to the shift to the right that was already occurring in GOP politics. Romney, primarily because of his support of federal legislation supporting the civil rights of African Americans, became a champion of the party’s fading moderate wing. He briefly considered a run for president in 1964 to help head off Goldwater’s nomination, but the moderates were too late and too divided to stop “Mr. Conservative.”

  Romney declined to endorse Goldwater and instead leaked a letter he had sent to the candidate, excoriating him for opposing federal civil rights legislation and for attacking federal entitlements. In words that 2012’s conservatives may have believed reflected the core beliefs of the son, George Romney told Goldwater, “Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation, lead to governmental crises and deadlocks, and stymie the compromises so often necessary to preserve freedom and achieve progress.”

  George was intent on mounting a more serious presidential bid in 1968, but found that Nixon, who had spent the previous five years of his seeming political exile earning favors from Republicans across the country, had locked up the nomination. Though probably not the decisive moment in his presidential quest that it has been made out to be, the most famous moment in Romney’s short-lived campaign was his assertion that he had been the victim of “brainwashing” by the military, which led him to be an early supporter of the Vietnam War, a position he no longer held by 1968.

  The person most impacted by Romney’s change of heart on Vietnam was his son. Mitt had first attended Stanford University in 1965 where he participated in counter-demonstrations to students protesting the Vietnam War. Now that George had cooled in his support of the war, so did Mitt, who did not serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam era. In addition to two student deferments to avoid military service, Romney also received a ministerial deferment when he pursued the traditional rite of passage among young Mormon men and served two years as a missionary in France, beginning at the age of nineteen. When he returned to the United States in 1970, he drew a high number in the draft lottery.

  Like many men of that era in similar circumstances, Romney expressed ambivalence about not serving. “I longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam and be representing our country there,” Romney said on one occasion, but said with equal conviction at another time, “It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam.”

  While performing mission work in France, Mitt Romney had left his girlfriend and fiancé, Ann Davies, in the States. Having already converted to Mormonism for Mitt, Ann waited for him and the couple married shortly after his return, later attending and graduating from Brigham Young University. Taking a short break from education to work on his mother’s unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1970, Mitt then pursued a rigorous dual degree program in law and business from Harvard University, where he became known for a remarkable work ethic even among this se
lect group of over-achievers.

  As a top Harvard graduate, Romney had his pick of several career options, but made the relatively unusual choice of going into management consulting, first for the Boston Consulting Group and later for Bain and Company. Seven years later, Romney was tapped to lead a new venture for the company, Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm.

  During the 2012 campaign, Romney repeatedly defended the concept of “creative destruction,” a phrase coined in the 1940s by Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter to describe a theory of economic innovation whereby the new—new goods, new methods of production, new markets—necessarily kills off the old. Romney himself acknowledged in his book, No Apology, that “creative destruction” is “inherently stressful—­on workers, managers, owners, bankers, suppliers, customers, and the communities that surround the affected business.” It was therefore incongruous that the Romney who praised the willingness to destroy in order to innovate took no risks of his own when he accepted the challenge of creating Bain Capital in 1984.

  Romney had been Bain and Company’s star consultant. He was comfortable with his life as it was. He had a stellar reputation and made good money. He knew that he and all the partners in the new firm would be asked to contribute to the investment fund. If he failed, both his reputation and his pocketbook would take a hit. So, he was offered an extraordinary deal. If the new venture fell short, Romney would get his old job and his old salary back plus all the raises he might have missed, and if Romney had to return to Bain and Company, the company would announce it was not because he had failed but because he was more valuable as a consultant. As boss, Bill Bain explained, Romney took “no professional or financial risk.”

  Bain’s business ventures under Romney’s leadership were too numerous and complicated to mention in detail. Suffice it to say that Bain could boast of successes not only for their investors, but sometimes also for workers. Staples, Inc. was an early Bain success and one of the companies most often cited by Romney when declaring himself a “job creator.” Where other investors declined to buy into the then speculative idea that a big box store selling nothing but office supplies could be hugely profitable—who would purchase that many paper clips or pencils?—Bain put $2.5 million into the fledgling company, allowing Staples to open its first store in 1986. By 2012, Staples had more than 2,200 stores and 89,000 employees.