Almost President (52 page)

While relatively few sponsors actually withdrew their support of the games, and there was never a serious chance that the games would be moved or cancelled, Romney would later insist that running the Winter Olympics that year involved “the most troubled turnaround” of which he had ever been a part. He trimmed expenses, sometimes substantially and sometimes symbolically. (Volunteers on the committee had usually been provided a free lunch buffet during meetings; now Romney charged them $1 for a slice of pizza.) Romney secured an additional $300 million in sponsorships to add to the $1 billion in sponsorships plus another $400 million in federal aid already in place prior to his arrival. The games went off without a hitch and ended with a nearly $300 million surplus, and Romney got a good deal of the credit.

The most controversial moment of Romney's tenure as head of the games was when police alleged he had used the F-word in a confrontation with a teenage volunteer directing traffic. Romney, whose strongest expletive was probably “poophead,” heatedly denied the allegation. “I have not used that word since college, all right?” Romney told reporters. “Or since high school.”

Having added saving the Olympic Games to his resume, Romney returned to Massachusetts to run for governor. After first paying back taxes to reassert that his primary residency was indeed Massachusetts, rather than low-tax Utah, Romney announced he would run in 2002, as he had in 1994, as a fiscal conservative and a social moderate. “My position has not changed,” Romney said of his support for legalized abortion.

Elected governor of Massachusetts at age fifty-five, the same age his father had been when first elected governor of Michigan, Romney learned that governing a state was not the same as managing a corporation. In an early meeting with legislators, Romney explained, “My usual approach has been to set a strategic vision for the enterprise and then work with executive vice presidents to implement that strategy.” It was a sour start given that legislators do not think of themselves as junior executives working under a CEO governor.

Romney had inherited a tough state economy, and he had a tough time turning it around. Job growth was anemic during most of his tenure, but his administration was scandal-free, and he successfully dealt with some modest budget deficits. It was a solid record, but he lacked the kind of signature achievement needed to gain attention and credibility as a potential presidential candidate, a next step Romney had begun actively planning just six months into his term as governor.

It was at this time that Romney also began recalibrating his beliefs, especially on social issues, in anticipation of needing to be seen as more socially conservative if he hoped to win the Republican presidential nomination. Romney claimed he had an epiphany on abortion while investigating the issue of using embryonic stem cells for medical research, and announced he would henceforth be “pro-life.” But there were other position changes, as well. Once opposed to “abstinence-only” sex education in schools, Romney now championed the program for young teens in minority neighborhoods. Once a strong opponent of new coal plants, Romney withdrew Massachusetts from a multi-state effort to combat greenhouse gases. He also became a leading crusader against same-sex marriage. While Romney had never supported same-sex marriage, his campaign against the idea seemed a betrayal to many gay rights activists who had been assured many times by Romney of his personal tolerance.

The issue that gained him national attention, however, was health insurance reform, a topic suggested to him by the founder of Staples, Thomas Steinberg. Steinberg noted that it made no financial sense to have a system where people without insurance were often forced to seek treatment in emergency rooms where the cost was “three, four, five times what it costs to go to a doctor's office,” especially when that extra cost would be passed on to others. As was his nature, Romney ran the data and concluded that universal health coverage could work in Massachusetts, which already had one of the nation's lowest percentages of uninsured residents. Romney sold the individual mandate as “the ultimate conservative idea” because it required all individuals who could afford it to take personal responsibility for their health care rather than “look to government to take care of them.”

Presaging the impassioned debate over Obamacare, Romney's proposal stirred strong debate in Massachusetts, but it received a huge boost when Senator Kennedy backed his former rival and endorsed the plan. In April 2006, Romney signed his health care reform package into law and began touting it in editorials published in major national newspapers. Yet, even in his moment of triumph, Romney hedged his bets, unsure exactly how his health care reform plan would play with conservatives nationally. Using his line item veto powers, Romney vetoed eight provisions in the bill, including one that fined small businesses for failing to provide health insurance to employees. He did so knowing the Democrats would override the vetoes and keep the reform package intact.

Even though he left office with a dismal job approval rating of 34 percent, perhaps reflecting voter sentiment that he had spent more time running for president than running the state, Romney now had the type of gubernatorial achievement that made him a serious presidential contender.

Entering the 2008 presidential race, Romney believed he had three main challenges: concerns about of his Mormon religion, concerns about the sincerity of his new conservative convictions, and the question raised by an early supporter: Could this fabulously wealthy man with the privileged upbringing “really relate to an average voter?”

On the Mormon issue (and demonstrating what strides Romney would make for the faith by 2012), surveys taken in 2006 found more than a third of voters said they would not vote for a Mormon for president and two-thirds thought the country was not ready for a Mormon president. By contrast, only 40 percent thought the nation was not ready for an African-American president. Romney's strategy, then, was to actively court leaders among evangelical Christians, who were seen as the most resistant to a Mormon candidate and who were also a key voting bloc in Republican primaries. He invited leading evangelicals, including Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Richard Land, to his home to discuss their concerns and assure them of the sincerity of his newly found conservative views on issues such as abortion.

The meeting went well enough that Romney was convinced he could win conservative Christians to his side, particularly if he contrasted himself with the men he considered his chief rivals for the 2008 nomination, Arizona Senator John McCain and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, both of whom were considered party moderates. Romney's goal was not simply to convince social conservatives that he was an acceptable candidate; he wanted to be their champion. It was a significant strategic mistake. It did not play to his strength, which was economic issues, nor did it seem sincere.

Romney blamed his loss in the Iowa caucuses on anti-Mormon sentiment held by the large number of evangelical voters there, but then he lost New Hampshire, too, this time to the eventual nominee, McCain. Observers concluded that Romney, the man who touted himself as an expert manager, was running a disjointed, wasteful, and inflexible campaign. Romney soldiered on for a few more primaries before throwing in the towel. His loyal campaigning for McCain led to Romney being briefly considered as McCain's running mate, but McCain ended up choosing Alaska Governor Sarah Palin instead.

Given the poor track record of losing vice presidential candidates winning a future presidential nomination, the snub was to Romney's advantage. Further, the financial crisis of 2008 had become the Great Recession of 2009. As the 2012 campaign kicked off in earnest in 2011, social issues were on the back burner; the economy was now clearly the number one issue in America. It seemed to need a turnaround artist, and Romney believed no one fit that bill better than himself.

Among conservatives, a second Obama term seemed unfathomable. With unemployment remaining at more than 8 percent through 2012, the economic recovery was anemic at best. They were certain Obamacare, which had been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court by a single vote thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts, was widely unpopular. And they were convinced there was a lingering uneasiness among many voters with Obama, an uneasiness that manifested itself in polls that showed nearly half of Republicans believed that Obama had not been born in the United States (Obama was born in Hawaii) and nearly a third of Republicans believed he was secretly a Muslim (Obama is a professed Christian).

A loss to Obama would be so disastrous that it would result, conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh said, in “the end of . . . the Republican Party.” Another leading conservative talk show host, Laura Ingraham, who called 2012 a “gimme election” for Republicans, went further: a Romney loss
should
“shut down the party. Shut it down, start new, with new people.”

So, when Romney did lose, and not in the squeaker everyone had expected, he quickly felt the wrath of party activists who embraced Ralph Waldo Emerson's dictum that “there is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune.”

Even though the Republican platform had been the party's most conservative since 1964 and Romney had faithfully hewn to its planks, conservatives bristled at suggestions that Romney's loss—accompanied by two lost Republican seats in the Senate and eight in the House—was due to the party having moved too far to the right. They countered that the problem was that their nominee had been too much a moderate. Conservative activist Craig Shirley went so far as to say that Romney's miscues proved, “in hindsight, he may have been the worst choice” the party could have made in 2012.

This was unfair—and inaccurate. First, Romney had done a number of things well in his campaign; he was a much-improved candidate from 2008. He had developed into a polished public speaker and an effective debater. He had raised an extraordinary amount of money—some $1 billion—not only for his campaign but also for the Republican Party. His campaign had also seemed free of leaks and infighting, befitting a candidate who claimed management skills as his top qualification for the presidency.

Second, the party had far worse alternatives. The field of candidates Romney had defeated to win the nomination was remarkably weak. Most highly regarded party leaders, including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, and many others, had passed on making a presidential bid, possibly not agreeing that 2012 was a “gimme election” for Republicans.

Perhaps as in 1988, when Democrats had expected Michael Dukakis to handily defeat Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush, Republicans had overestimated how favorable conditions were to their cause, and underestimated how badly damaged the Republican brand remained in 2012.
7
 

Incumbent presidents are difficult to unseat. From 1900 through 2012, there were eighteen presidential elections where an incumbent president was on the ballot; the incumbent lost only five of those elections. In four of those five elections, the incumbent presidents—William Howard Taft, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush—had faced a strong intra-party challenge that weakened their general election candidacy. While overt enthusiasm for Obama in 2012 was noticeably less than in 2008, Democrats remained united behind Obama and he faced no in-party challenge.

Republicans, of course, hoped the analogy with Obama would be Herbert Hoover in 1932, when Hoover became the only incumbent since 1900 to lose without having a strong intra-party challenge. However, Hoover in 1932 was presiding over an economy that was significantly worse than that facing Obama in 2012, and it was an economy getting demonstrably worse before Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933.

What benefited Obama was that the economy, for all its problems, was seen as improving. In this respect, Obama's situation was akin not to Hoover but Ronald Reagan in 1984, when Reagan won a landslide victory despite a national unemployment rate of 7.4 percent. Because that number was down from the 10.8 percent peak that had occurred in Reagan's second year in office, Reagan's campaign was able to declare “It's Morning in America” to underpin his reelection.

The economic recovery under Obama was far too anemic and fragile for such crowing in 2012, but the unemployment rate had dropped from a 10 percent high in early 2010 to just under 8 percent a month before the election. Obama could also cite thirty consecutive months of private sector job growth, booming stock markets, and an increase in home construction and home prices as further proof that things were getting better, albeit slowly. Romney, advertised as an expert in turning around failing businesses, could no longer assert the economy was headed in the wrong direction, but had to make the more difficult argument that he could spur more improvement more quickly than was occurring.

Republicans were also baffled that voters still blamed the Republican administration of President George W. Bush more than Obama for the nation's economic problems, though it was now nearly four years since Bush had left office. Post-election surveys found that 52 percent of Americans felt Bush's policies were primarily to blame for the lingering economic difficulties compared to just 38 percent who blamed Obama. Congressional Republicans, over whom Romney had no control, also bore the brunt of the blame when the nation's credit rating was downgraded in 2011 following a standoff with Obama over an increase in the nation's debt ceiling.