Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America (5 page)

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?

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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.
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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.

The one area where Romney found common ground with the Democrats was on comprehensive health care reform, which became his signature achievement as governor. The Massachusetts law required every citizen to
purchase insurance—an individual mandate—or pay a penalty. Romney was initially skeptical about whether the state could in fact achieve universal coverage. Once he was convinced it was possible, he threw himself into the effort to design a program. He called in outside experts and applied the tools of a management consultant to the task. Democratic legislators expanded the measure beyond what Romney had recommended, but he proudly signed it into law, with his old rival Ted Kennedy at the ceremony. “
My son said that having Senator Kennedy
and me together like this on stage, behind the same piece of landmark legislation, will help slow global warming,” Romney joked. “That’s because Hell has frozen over.” When it was Kennedy’s turn to speak, he said, “My son said something too and that is when Kennedy and Romney support a piece of legislation, usually one of them hasn’t read it.” Pausing for laughter from the audience, he said, “That’s not true today, is it governor?”

As governor, Romney underwent a transformation on social issues. He shifted on gay rights. He had never supported same-sex marriage and spoke out against the state’s highest court when it approved it. He also backed away from his endorsement of a federal antidiscrimination statute and a more expansive position on whether openly gay soldiers should be allowed to serve in the military. He changed his position on abortion. When he ran for governor he said he was personally pro-life but would do nothing to limit a woman’s right to choose. Later, as he was working on the issue of stem cell research and funding, he said he came out of the experience with a different view. He declared that he was staunchly pro-life. The bumpy transition came as Romney’s ambitions shifted from Massachusetts to the presidency.

In February 2005, a group of reporters from the
Post
interviewed Romney at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington. He was already eyeing the race for president but had not yet publicly ruled out running for reelection as governor. I noted that his position as stated then—personally opposed to abortion but opposed to any changes in the law that would restrict a woman’s right to obtain one—was almost identical to that of Senator John Kerry. But Kerry called himself pro-choice while Romney called himself pro-life. I asked him to explain the difference. “I can tell you what my position is,” he said, “and it’s in a very narrowly defined sphere, as candidate for governor and as governor of Massachusetts, what I said to people was that I personally did not favor abortion, that I am personally pro-life. However, as governor I would not change the laws of the commonwealth relating to abortion. Now, I don’t try and put a bow around that and say, ‘What does that mean you are—does that mean you’re pro-life or pro-choice?’ Because that whole package—meaning I’m personally pro-life but I won’t change the laws, you could describe that as—well, I don’t think you can describe it in one hyphenated word.” My
colleague Ruth Marcus then asked, “Do you support making abortion illegal? I’m not talking about what you would do as governor.” Romney replied, “But that’s the furthest I’m going to take you right now. I’m governor of Massachusetts, I’m running for governor of Massachusetts, and I’m telling you exactly what I will do as governor of Massachusetts, but I’m not going to tell you what I’d do as mayor of Boston or a congressman or any of those positions.” Marcus pressed him again: “I just wanted to understand the thinking behind that status quo theory. If the majority of the state has a particular position, is that the position that you have?” she asked. Romney’s concluding response was this: “I’m not going to enter into a philosophical ‘where it comes from.’ I’m just telling you . . . what it is.” It was that kind of slippery language and evasiveness that gave rise to skepticism among conservatives that he was truly one of them.