The Real Romney by Michael Kranish & Scott Helman

Author:Michael Kranish & Scott Helman [Kranish, Michael & Helman, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

[ Nine ]

The CEO Governor

I don’t think that government is about doing favors for people. I think it’s doing the right thing for the folks we represent.

—MITT ROMNEY, 2007

A year before the torch was lit for the Winter Olympics, Mitt Romney’s leadership was already earning him mentions as a potential candidate for governor in two states. With his 1994 loss to Ted Kennedy now but a bad memory, Romney was eager to make another run at public office. But would he stay in Utah, where some pundits suggested his politics aligned more with the Democratic Party, or would he return home to try again in Massachusetts? As with other major decisions in his life, this one would not be driven by impulse, but by a careful strategic assessment of the political landscape. “If politics is part of the mix, which it may be,” Romney said at one point, “a lot of that depends on where the opportunity is.”

Friends and his former chief political adviser figured Romney was destined for Washington, for a cabinet or other high-level position under President George W. Bush. Speculation had also grown about a run in conservative Utah, however, after Romney objected to a July 2001 story in The Salt Lake Tribune describing him as “pro-choice” on abortion. “I do not wish to be labeled pro-choice,” he wrote in a letter to the editor. But later in 2001, a column in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News, citing sources close to Romney, suggested that he wanted a perch with enough national exposure to enable him to run for president. And Massachusetts was clearly the bigger launching pad. There was just one problem: Jane Swift, elevated to acting governor of Massachusetts when her boss, Paul Cellucci, had become U.S. ambassador to Canada, was preparing to anchor the GOP ticket in 2002. Romney had said there was little chance that he would challenge his fellow Republican.

Swift, though, was struggling politically. Panic-stricken Republicans feared losing the governorship, their only prize in the lopsidedly Democratic state. As one Republican town chairman put it at the time, “People are just sort of ready to jump ship and line up with somebody they think that can carry the ball in November.” Barbara Anderson, Massachusetts’s best-known antitax activist, recalled leaving this message on Romney’s answering machine: “I know you’re really busy now with the Olympics, but when you’re finished, please come back and save Massachusetts.” The state Republican Party’s new chairwoman, Kerry Healey, discreetly flew to Salt Lake City to gauge Romney’s intentions. He was noncommittal. Romney was telling other leading Republicans he wasn’t planning to run.

But then the Olympics went off with poignant beauty, and Romney was widely credited with rescuing the Games from financial ruin and scandal. “The guy looks like he walks on water,” Dan Jones, whose Utah poll registered Romney’s approval rating at 87 percent, said at the time. In Massachusetts, Romney commissioned his own poll, which showed he would be a viable candidate against any Democrat. His agents on

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