by Ann Romney
After what we experienced during that 1994 Senate campaign, Mitt was reluctant to start another one in 2002. We would lose our private life, and everything we did or said would show up in the headlines. Years later, Mitt remembered having a dream in which he was trying to get out of a parking garage and the person in front of him seemed to take forever to pay. In this dream, Mitt got irritated and honked his horn, and the guy turned around to yell at him. Mitt got out of his car, and the two of them argued and then got back in their cars. It was the kind of thing that might actually happen—except, in the dream, the next day the entire encounter showed up on YouTube.
Politics is like a cage fight—only bloodier. The opposition tries to create the worst possible image of you. Once, for example, while Mitt was governor, we were on our annual family vacation at our summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. At about eight thirty in the evening, while Mitt, Josh, and Craig were putting everything away, they heard screams for help coming from somewhere offshore. They got on jet skis and raced out into the dusk. A family of six adults and a dog had been tossed into the water about three hundred yards from shore when their nineteen-foot wooden boat suddenly began taking on water. It sank in just minutes, and they’d been in the water for quite some time. They were wearing life jackets, so they weren’t in danger of drowning, but because it was getting dark, they easily could have been hit by a passing speedboat. Mitt pulled two of them and the dog onto his jet ski and brought them back to shore, while Josh and Craig stayed on the scene. Two more trips brought the rest of the family to safety. Eventually we took them to their home across the lake.
Newspapers reported the story of the governor helping rescue a family in New Hampshire; and when he walked into his office a few days later, he found his staff had put a stuffed Scottie dressed in a bathing suit and a life preserver in his chair.
Mitt, Josh, and Craig hadn’t gone into a burning building, but they had provided help in a potentially dangerous situation. But rather than acknowledging a good deed, the opposition party attacked: one state representative told the Boston Herald, “There are lots of people drowning in the Commonwealth right now who would certainly welcome a rescue.” Another representative criticized us for vacationing in New Hampshire. “Other governors would have been condemned for leaving the state, but Romney seems to have privileges other governors haven’t.” And a party spokesperson added that Mitt, who had lived in Massachusetts for thirty years, “only chooses to run for office in Massachusetts. He doesn’t vacation here.” That was the criticism he received for rescuing people! If you’ve got thin skin, politics is not for you.
Also looming over our decision was the reality of my health. While my MS was in remission, we didn’t know for certain the triggers that might lead to another attack. Nor did we know what the extent or severity of such an attack would be. That was an unknown we had gotten used to living with. But stress certainly might be a trigger, and as we had learned, there are few things more stressful, win or lose, than a political campaign. Running for political office, even on the state level, requires a total commitment of time and energy. It’s more than a full-time job. There is no allowance for headaches or illness, no time to deal with personal or family issues. It’s up early in the morning, put on a smile, and deal with whatever happens.
I had been speaking regularly with Dr. Weiner, so I called to ask him how a political campaign might affect me. Dr. Weiner has always been a voice of encouragement. He urges his patients to keep moving forward. He wants them to do as much as they can safely do. But there are some circumstances where a line has to be drawn: he had a patient who was a Navy pilot, and after an MS attack the Navy wouldn’t put him back in a cockpit. Still, the one trap Dr. Weiner urged his patients not to fall into was unnecessarily limiting their lives. He did not want his patients to be afraid of living a full life. “Look, Ann,” he told me. “I don’t think this is going to cause a relapse. You can handle it. The one thing you have to be aware of is hitting the wall. If you get tired you have to stop. Just tell whoever you have to tell that your batteries need to be recharged. But other than that, go for it.”
We had a family meeting to make the final decision. Mitt believed there were things he could do as governor that would be important for the people of Massachusetts. The boys and their wives sat with Mitt and me, and we talked it out. I was ambivalent; while I believed Mitt would be an excellent governor, I didn’t want to leave the life I had built in Utah so soon. I had recovered my health there; I loved riding, I loved being outdoors, I loved being with Margo and the girls in the barn. As much as I considered Boston home, I wasn’t quite ready to go back. I was healthy in Utah, and Boston was where I had been sick.
While each member of the family has a vote, in reality some votes are more equal than others. My vote was the one that counted most. Mitt was clear: he would not go forward with a campaign if I thought it was going to be too much for me, or if it would have a negative effect on my health. It turned out there was unanimous agreement within the family: basically it was up to me. If my health permitted it, they were in favor of Mitt going after the nomination. Then they all looked to me. In so many different ways, Mitt and our boys each asked me if I really believed I was up to the stress of a political campaign.
In my heart I was probably the least inclined of everyone in the family to want to do it. I was in a happy place, and I knew that politics at times could get very ugly. I didn’t want to go into a dark, scary place. My hesitation had nothing to do with winning—I could deal with a win or a loss. I was much more concerned about uprooting myself from a supportive environment. But I knew it was something Mitt wanted to do, and something he could do very well. He could make a real difference in people’s lives. My instincts told me this was the right thing to do.
Let’s do it, I said—or something like that which conveyed a lot more confidence than I felt.
Massachusetts is a difficult state for a Republican running for political office. Democrats outnumber Republicans three to one. Mitt once joked, “Being a Conservative Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention.” But he had gained a tremendous amount of respect because of the job he’d done at the Olympics.
For Mitt, it was like jumping from one frying pan into another. He didn’t take time to decompress; he just went into a different mode. Fortunately, there was no party primary, so it was a relatively brief campaign, and beyond some newspaper interviews there wasn’t much for me to do. When Mitt moved back to Boston, I remained in Utah for several weeks. I just wasn’t ready. Mentally, emotionally, and physically I just couldn’t bear to leave my horses. I couldn’t leave the mountains; I couldn’t leave all the things that had kept me healthy and strong and go back to the place where I had gotten sick. So I didn’t jump back into a campaign arena. I flew back to see Mitt on weekends, and then for a month, and then I screwed up my courage and decided it was time to go home for good.
But I needed to take my equine therapy with me. I shipped my horse back to Boston, and Margo and Jan both helped me find the right barn for him. In fact, Margo came back to Boston with me. I remember watching as she put my saddle in place in the new barn and realizing that the amazing experience I’d had in Salt Lake was really over. Oh no, Margo, I thought. I can’t do this without you, not without you being part of my life here. I knew how incredibly hard it was going to be to adjust again. While everything about Boston was familiar to me—I knew every street and building—I was seeing it through my new eyes for the first time.
I was fortunate to be able to keep a reasonably low profile throughout the campaign. The reporters knew about my disease but didn’t quite know how to handle it. It actually was a tricky issue; if the campaign brought it up, some people might believe we were looking for sympathy votes, but we couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist, either. Mitt’s staff never developed a strategy for me. They didn’t have to. I had learned my lessons in the Senate campaign. During that campaig
n I had been open and honest, and perhaps a little naïve. I certainly had a lot to learn about politics. I admitted that Mitt and I didn’t fight with each other, I talked about having to lose weight, and I reminisced about our student days. I was turned into a cliché as journalists inaccurately equated my being a stay-at-home mother who’d raised five kids while loving her husband with being a so-called Stepford Wife, a robotic woman who existed only to serve her husband’s needs. Those journalists should have spent one day with me when we had five boys in the house.
Throughout the campaign, I was very cautious. I took small steps, waiting to see how my body responded. And when I was comfortable, I took slightly bigger steps. I was gradually regaining my confidence. I attended some events with Mitt and made other low-key appearances by myself, but I was never heavily involved.
The biggest issue in the campaign was how to solve Massachusetts’s fiscal problem. The state needed to raise several billion dollars to balance the budget. Mitt was a successful businessman, but he was running against a liberal Irish-Catholic woman in a liberal, Irish-Catholic state. The polls bounced around more than I had when I’d started riding again. In late September, after the Democratic nominating convention, Mitt was trailing by six points, but by Election Day, the race was too close to call. At that point there was nothing much more we could do. We went to bed the night before not knowing what to expect. Slightly over two million votes were cast, and Mitt won by more than a hundred thousand votes. Standing on the stage that night was one of the most memorable experiences of my life. We had come a long way. Only a few years earlier I’d thought there was nothing left for me, but since then, I’d carried the Olympic torch, and now I was standing with my husband to celebrate an important political victory. I was immensely grateful.
Mitt had won the election. Now all he had to do was get Massachusetts back on track. He had proven himself to be a great manager, but in running the state, he turned to what he had learned from his father: “I saw how he solicited advice from other people, how he built a team, how he made decisions based on data and analysis and solid thinking, not just gut feeling or opinion,” Mitt says.
Following that example, the first thing Mitt did was to put together a strong organization. Several people joined his administration who eventually would play an important part in our lives, among them Natalie Waczko and Beth Myers. Natalie was living in Toronto and working as a policy adviser for the Canadian government’s Ministry of Tourism, Culture, and Sport when a friend of hers who was working on Mitt’s 2002 campaign suggested she come to Boston. She’d visited Boston as a member of the Havergal College prep school rowing team to compete in the Head of the Charles Regatta and had liked it so much she wanted to find a way to come back. She joined the campaign. If you met Natalie, you loved Natalie, period. She had a wonderful, infectious laugh. Just describing her makes me smile: She was spontaneous, joyful, silly at times, and fun to be with. She seemed to get a kick out of life.
On the job, she was the exact opposite: She was a no-nonsense, get-the-job-done, no-foolishness kind of person who was able to get the things done that needed to be done and do so without making anybody angry or upset. While she was working on the campaign, she met Bradley Crate, and they fell in love. They tried to hide it, but they fooled exactly nobody, and we all were thrilled for them. Eventually they got married and had a little girl, Helena.
When Mitt took a look at his new office, he realized it was in pretty bad shape. Dark drapes were torn, and blinds were broken. Curtain rods were missing or bent. Paint was peeling from the walls. The furnishings were spartan: sufficient but quite a bit less than might be expected for a state’s chief executive. A lot of repair work was needed, but there was no money to do it. Because Massachusetts was in financial difficulty, there weren’t funds to pay for necessities, much less to make office repairs or improvements. There certainly was no money in the budget for the First Lady’s office! In fact, I didn’t have an office, and I didn’t have a single staff person. Natalie ended up wearing two hats, one as Mitt’s assistant and gatekeeper. If you wanted to see him, you had to go through her, and he trusted her judgment to decide whom was important for him to see and whom she should steer him away from. The second hat she wore was as my assistant. Together, we spruced up Mitt’s office.
Natalie was in charge of scheduling for both Mitt and me. She scheduled events I needed to attend and often went with me to them; she became invaluable to both of us. In due course, we became good friends. I grew to love her like a daughter.
One of the causes we worked together on was raising funds for horse therapy; we had seen the difference it could make in people’s lives. Among the recipients of our efforts was the Tewksbury Hospital Equestrian Farm. T.H.E. Farm works with people with both physical and mental disorders, and is situated on state-owned land. Mitt signed a ninety-nine-year lease for it, making certain it would be helping people for almost another century.
Beth Myers first met Mitt when she worked on his 1994 Senate campaign, but we really got to know her in 2002, when she agreed to play his debate sparring partner. As she says, “My first real interaction with Mitt was saying nasty things to him. I was playing his opponent, and I’d answer the question then throw a nasty zinger his way.” Beth did such an effective job helping him prepare for the debates that after the election he asked her to become his chief of staff. Later she ran his first presidential campaign. She remained one of his closest advisers. They worked together so well that Beth became known in the media as Mitt’s “office wife.”
Beth took the job on the condition that she could leave the office and spend the hours between five in the evening and nine in the morning every day with her kids. She had a phone on her desk, and her rule was that if one of her kids called, she answered it. It didn’t matter who was in her office, if one of the kids was calling, that took precedence. Only once did Mitt ever say anything about it. Beth’s son Curt was very busy being a boy, doing boy things and getting caught at them. He generated a lot of phone calls from teachers and camp counselors. One afternoon, Beth was in an important staff meeting with Mitt and several others when Natalie walked in and told her that Curt’s summer camp counselor was on the phone—again. Mitt looked at Beth and said, “Unless Curt has burned down the camp, can he just wait?”
As chief of staff, Beth was at the center of every decision. Her job, as she once described it, was “to put all of the information on the table. Then let Mitt wallow in the data!” Among two of the biggest issues they dealt with were solving the state’s fiscal problems and finding a way to get every citizen health insurance. When Mitt took office the state was looking at a multi-billion-dollar budget gap. He managed to balance the budget all four years of his administration, and when he left office, there was a two-billion-dollar “rainy day” fund in the bank.
Crafting a program that would provide access to good health insurance for every citizen and then getting it passed through the legislature would be even more difficult than balancing the state budget. I think that in some ways, my battle with MS was one of the things that led Mitt to take on the challenge. We knew that our own excellent health insurance meant that we could follow whatever medical path we chose to diagnose and treat my disease. But Mitt also knew from his years of service as a lay pastor in our church that people without insurance didn’t have the kind of choices we had. In some cases, he saw that people simply couldn’t get the care they needed.
Early during Mitt’s term as governor, Tom Stemberg, a friend of ours who also happened to be the founder of Staples, the office superstore, stopped by Mitt’s office to make a suggestion. He said, “Mitt, why did you run for governor?” Mitt answered as Tom knew he would, “Because I want to help people.” Tom then continued: “Well, if you really want to help people, you should find a way to get every citizen health insurance.”
Mitt objected, arguing that with the state’s finances in such bad shape, there was no way the state would be able to afford to do it. But Tom p
ersisted: “You’re smart, Mitt. I’m sure you can find a way.”
Mitt and I talked at length about Tom’s visit. Mitt also spoke with Beth Myers and other key members of his administration about it. He was certain that there was no way it could be accomplished financially. At the same time, it was a challenge and an opportunity he simply would not brush aside. It was a burr under the saddle.
Months later, Mitt came up with the framework of a plan. Massachusetts was already spending millions of dollars every year to reimburse hospitals that had provided free charity care for people who didn’t have health insurance. Those funds came both from the federal government and from state tax revenues. Mitt’s idea was to see whether those hospital reimbursement funds could be redirected to help poor uninsured people buy private health insurance. The big question was whether the cost of health insurance would be greater than the reimbursement funds.
Months of analysis and brilliant work led by his secretary of health and human services, Tim Murphy, provided the answer he had hoped for. Not only would the funds be adequate, but they would be more than adequate. The state might actually save money by helping people get insurance rather than having them show up at emergency rooms to get free care that would later be reimbursed by the state.
Mitt’s advisers cautioned him that his plan might not sit well with some in his party: health care was seen as a Democratic issue, and anything that sounded like universal health care could make people think of socialized medicine. But Mitt was unmoved. He and his team had worked with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, and that organization had liked what he came up with. Also, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich had once suggested a similar approach. Requiring people to have health insurance rather than having them expect to get free care paid for by the government was a conservative approach, not a liberal one.