The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  Romney credited George and Lenore with giving him his civil rights values. “At a very young age, my parents taught me important lessons about tolerance and respect,” he said. “I have carried these lessons with me throughout my life and will bring them with me if I am fortunate enough to be elected governor.”

  In an echo of his 1994 platform, Romney positioned himself as an agent of change, vowing to “clean up the mess on Beacon Hill,” the seat of state government. And there was plenty to clean up: government was still rife with patronage and waste. Romney exuded competence and promised fresh thinking, an especially appealing profile to voters who had for years elected Republican governors to check the power of the dominant Democratic establishment. Even though the Republican Party had long owned the corner office, Romney had no ties to government, the GOP’s own cronyism, or its oversight of the granddaddy of all messes—the cost overruns and mismanagement of the $15 billion Big Dig highway project in Boston.

  Romney debuted a sophisticated “microtargeting” program to drill deep into voter behavior, seeking to identify supporters through their voting history and other personal information. He pitched himself squarely to independents, who made up half the Massachusetts electorate. Unlike O’Brien, he supported the death penalty, which had long been abolished, and an initiative petition on that year’s ballot to replace bilingual education with English immersion. With the state losing jobs and facing a ballooning budget deficit, Romney said his business experience had been the perfect proving ground. He insisted he could cut $1 billion from the state’s $23 billion budget by eliminating the fat—all while rolling back taxes over several years. Neither candidate took a no-new-taxes pledge; Romney’s campaign spokesman dubbed it “government by gimmickry,” though in a future campaign he would embrace just such a pledge. Romney vowed to fight any tax increase, although he did propose raising excise taxes on vehicles such as trucks and sport-utility vehicles that got poor gas mileage. That idea unnerved his political advisers, given that Romney needed truck and SUV owners to stand with him at the polls.

  If Romney’s message was smartly framed, the packaging—that of the financier with crisp shirts—needed work. One of the first things his campaign did was to make sure his BMW remained stowed out of sight. The image of Romney behind the wheel of a fancy car—and a European one, at that—was not exactly what advisers wanted in voters’ minds. Later in the campaign, Romney engaged in a number of made-for-TV-news “workdays,” in which he took turns performing blue-collar jobs—an auto mechanic, a road paver, and a garbage man, among others—doffing his suit and tie for tradesmen’s garb. O’Brien, in her victory speech on primary night, got some good mileage out of it. “Massachusetts,” she said, “doesn’t need a governor who thinks getting in touch with working people is a costume party.”

  Romney was indeed struggling to connect with the people. One of his TV ads, designed to humanize him, backfired, instead underscoring the disconnect between his seemingly storybook life and the lives of many voters. Called “Ann,” the spot featured the Romneys talking about their high school romance and family. Mitt professed his love for his wife: “Ann’s just good to the core.” It closed with video of Mitt in a bathing suit horsing around with his sons on a raft at the lake. His poll numbers tumbled. Three weeks into the seven-week general-election campaign, his own internal polls had him trailing O’Brien by ten points. Within the campaign, some advisers thought the cloying tone of the ad had encased the candidate in plastic. “I think it made him appear to be too perfect,” recalled Murphy, the irreverent strategist and media consultant who crafted the ad, insisting that it would have worked in any other state. “There’s a certain cynicism in the Massachusetts electorate, and it locked into that.”

  Panic was setting in at Romney headquarters in North Cambridge. Some advisers grew resentful of Murphy, who had developed a big national reputation after leading John McCain’s valiant fight against George W. Bush for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. After a weekend meeting of senior campaign aides at Romney’s home, the candidate stood by his chief strategist. “Mike came and said, ‘It’s not working. My strategy is wrong, and you either ought to change the strategy dramatically as I’m going to suggest, or you ought to fire me,’ ” Romney later recalled. Romney considered his options but decided to keep Murphy and try the new tack. Instead of selling voters on Romney, the campaign would work to sour them on O’Brien—round two for the tough new Mitt.

  It was October 2, the morning after Romney and O’Brien had met for their second debate, at a technical college in the central Massachusetts city of Worcester. Many thought O’Brien had won. But Romney and his advisers sat in the family room of his home in Belmont that day and made a shrewd judgment: O’Brien’s aggressive style, they predicted, would not wear well. So after initially resisting additional debates between the two candidates, Romney did an about-face and called for more. The strategy paid off. The subsequent clashes allowed Romney to perfect his attacks on O’Brien and showcase himself as a confident, focused executive whom voters could easily imagine running the state.

  He perhaps went too far in trying to highlight O’Brien’s aggressive tone in the final debate, calling her tactics “unbecoming.” To O’Brien and her supporters, the comment smacked of patronizing sexism, and it earned Romney some unfavorable headlines. But O’Brien probably did herself more damage, in part by endorsing lowering, to sixteen, the age at which girls could get abortions without parental consent. Together with her recent shift to supporting gay marriage—a year before the state’s highest court ordered it—the abortion answer eroded her centrist appeal. “That last debate was probably the point where things really began breaking my way,” Romney told reporters while campaigning in Boston the night before the election. “That was the time when the independents and the undecideds really started to move.”

  Murphy, meanwhile, produced two devastating ads that featured a “watchdog”—Duncan the basset hound—snoozing as men removed bags of money from the state treasury. Using humor, the ads fused loosely related issues—including $7 billion in state pension fund losses in the stock market crash on O’Brien’s watch and the lobbying work of O’Brien’s husband, a former state representative—to shake her credentials as a manager and cast her as an insider. O’Brien called the ad “as disgraceful as it is inaccurate,” but it worked. At the same time, O’Brien’s advertisements exhumed the corporate-raider attack Kennedy had used so effectively on Romney in 1994. One featured a steelworker who had lost a job in the shutdown of a Kansas City plant bought by Bain Capital. “It was the Ted Kennedy punch, but it was gone,” said Michael Travaglini, O’Brien’s deputy treasurer at the time. “The Olympics had made Mitt a real celebrity. That carried significant weight, and it made him more credible.”

  After trailing O’Brien by double digits, Romney had climbed back into the race. By November 1, the contest was deadlocked. Romney’s team had counted on O’Brien turning people off, and that seemed to be happening. Voters indicated that they liked her less than they had a month before and liked Romney more. Four days later, on November 5, the Romney-Healey ticket romped, defeating O’Brien and her running mate, Christopher Gabrieli, by 106,000 votes, or 5 percent, of 2.2 million cast. The Republicans held their tiny base, limited Democratic margins in the urban strongholds, and, most crucially, swept the independent-rich suburbs and exurbs in Greater Boston. Romney’s obsession with building campaign strategy around voter data had worked. “We took on an entrenched machine and we won,” he declared to supporters at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. “Tonight we sent a loud and clear message. That message is that it’s time for a new era.” Romney, while celebrating his victory, took a congratulatory phone call from President George W. Bush from aboard Air Force One.

  There was much to celebrate. Forty years after George Romney had won his first election as governor of Michigan, his son had fulfilled a lifelong goal: following his father into public office. Both were fifty-five when first electe
d. Both turned their business backgrounds into political assets. And both won by running as moderate Republicans who appealed to the political center. Heartening as well, especially for Massachusetts Mormons, was that Romney’s religion had never become an issue in the 2002 campaign. It felt good, at least for the moment, to be past all that. And for Romney, it felt even better to exorcise the demons of 1994 once and for all. The bitter disappointment at Kennedy’s easy victory, the frustration he felt afterward for having failed to articulate a clear message and for having offered a phlegmatic response to attacks on his business record—all of that was now gone, lost in the glare of his success and growing national notice. Mitt Romney would soon be the seventieth governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

  He followed in the footsteps of some famous men: three signers of the Declaration of Independence and a future U.S. president. Also, of course, some rogues. But Romney was the state’s first self-styled CEO governor, and he brought a new approach to the top job. A few weeks after being sworn in, he was visiting with leading state lawmakers in the Senate Reception Room at the Massachusetts statehouse, an ornate sanctuary with tall windows and a barrel-vaulted ceiling that sits just off the Senate chamber. Campaign season was over. Now it was time to cool the partisan rhetoric and figure out how to govern together. Romney, a Republican in a sea of Democrats, gamely offered his hellos, shook some hands, and then gave brief remarks.

  Romney told his new colleagues that he’d led Bain Capital, held leadership positions in large companies, and was now looking forward to working with all of them in doing the people’s business. “My usual approach,” one former lawmaker recalled him as saying, “has been to set the strategic vision for the enterprise and then work with executive vice presidents to implement that strategy.” Andrea F. Nuciforo, Jr., then a state senator from western Massachusetts, said he had leaned over to a fellow legislator and sighed, “This is going to be a long four years.” Romney seemed to be suggesting that he was the boss and state lawmakers his deputies. “My take on it was, here is a person who is well-intentioned and competent but unclear on the basic concept,” Nuciforo remarked.

  Romney had long wanted a high-profile job in politics, and now he had it. A lifetime of study, preparation, and hard work seemed to be paying off. But he also had a state to manage, and that wasn’t something he knew much about. Nor was he familiar with the clubby quarters of the statehouse, where Democrats had run the show for decades, often from back rooms. He had staked his candidacy on his outsider status—the Bain consultant who would come into state government, throw open the hood, and make it run better. Now the outsider had come inside and found it a foreign place, with rituals and customs all its own. Every time he spouted a “Holy cow!” or dropped a “Golly!”—not exactly vernacular in the world of politics—he seemed born of a different species.

  In an early showdown with Romney over the state budget, lawmakers were eager to teach the new governor a lesson in how things worked. After the House and Senate passed the final version of their joint spending plan, Romney issued a litany of vetoes. The legislature responded by holding one of its marathon sessions, taking up the vetoes one by one, and promptly reversing scores of them. Around midnight, a Senate leader stood up and proposed that the body adjourn “in memory of Mitt Romney.” As Nuciforo put it, “The legislature had really killed this notion that he was going to run the place and we were there to execute his wishes.” It was a glimmer of the hurdles that lay ahead, as Romney sought to apply his corporate methods and cool analytical acumen to a political culture that was deeply entrenched and, many believed, unaccountable and ill suited to carry Massachusetts into the next millennium. Yet, from the beginning, Romney showed he could drive a bargain, thwarting an attempt by legislative leaders to raise the pay of their lieutenants and forcing a budget that ultimately avoided a broad-based tax hike.

  Willing to look beyond the Republican Party for top talent, Romney turned to high-powered figures such as Robert C. Pozen, a former top executive at Fidelity Investments; and Douglas I. Foy, the longtime president of the nonprofit Conservation Law Foundation. Over twenty-five years, Foy had been a relentless force at the law foundation, which had won numerous landmark lawsuits to protect the quality of air, water, and open space in New England, including litigation preventing a second reactor at the Seabrook, New Hampshire, nuclear plant and oil drilling in the Georges Bank fishing grounds. Pozen had been vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, practiced and taught law, and been associate general counsel of the Securities and Exchange Commission. They were the biggest names in a strong lineup, and Romney gave both broad authority over new “supersecretariats” that oversaw economic development, housing, the environment, and more. This had long been a Romney credo: surround yourself with smart, aggressive players and let them go to work.

  Once Romney had his team in place, he managed the way he knew how: he wanted piles of data and robust, free-flowing debate. One of Pozen’s major tasks was to rescue the state’s nearly insolvent unemployment insurance fund, which was draining quickly because of the state’s generous benefits during a time of high joblessness. He focused on a plan that would reward firms with stable employment and require greater contributions from employers that often cut their workforce. “We probably presented him with ten or twenty different [computer] runs,” he recalled of his dealings with Romney. “He would go through them and really absorb the data and try to figure it out.”

  Foy came from an environmental background, Romney from a business one. But they found common ground in wanting to minimize sprawl, using the state’s leverage to promote density in development, and maximize open space. As a candidate, Romney had called sprawl “the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts.” Romney threw himself behind the notion of “smart growth,” as it was known, rewarding communities that clustered new residential and commercial projects, particularly around mass transit hubs. This view of economic development also manifested itself in what became known as a “fix-it-first” transportation policy, in which Romney’s administration would focus on repairing existing roads and bridges instead of building new highway systems at the request of local politicians.

  On these issues or any other, Romney wanted to know every argument for and against a certain course of action—he was “a decision maker by devil’s advocacy,” said Eric A. Kriss, with whom Romney had worked at Bain for years before tapping him to be state budget chief. “He would take conflicting facts and different perspectives and put them all on the table and have everyone argue all sides. There were times when I knew privately the outcome he favored, but he would actually take the opposite view of his own opinion, so that he could not only try it on for size but also know what the pushback would be.”

  From the moment they got into office, Romney and his team faced an urgent task. The budget was in meltdown. The state faced a potential $650 million deficit. Worse, his analysts discovered that the projected shortfall for the following year was exploding—from $2 billion to $3 billion in a $23 billion budget. Romney and the legislature settled on an austere plan to close nearly all the projected gap. His leadership in steering the state through the fiscal maelstrom is unquestionably one of his key achievements. In the retelling, however, he and his aides have often overstated the accomplishment. The budget gap never became as wide as Romney said, because tax collections came in more than $1.2 billion above preliminary estimates. He also understated the side effects of the rescue plan: big fee increases, more tax dollars wrested out of business, and increased pressure on local property taxes.

  The plan raised at least $331 million in new revenue through increased fees for permits, licenses, and services—about a 45 percent jump. Massachusetts residents suddenly found it more expensive to get a driver’s license, marry, or buy a home. In addition, it raised $128 million from tax code tweakings to close what Romney called loopholes for businesses. Some eliminated schemes by corporations to avoid state taxes by sheltering income in shell compa
nies. Many business leaders considered the changes tax increases, even if Romney didn’t call them that. Another $181 million in so-called loophole closings followed in the next two years.

  The effects of the deep spending cuts were also felt in cities and towns, which absorbed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of reductions in state assistance over the first eighteen months of Romney’s term. When Romney left office, Massachusetts communities—in a twenty-five-year high—relied on property taxes to cover 53 percent of their budgets, up from 49 percent before Romney took office. Many communities cut services and raised fees on residents as a result. Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney’s longtime spokesman, said that local officials had exaggerated the impact of the cuts, which had been made necessary by a plunge in state tax revenues. “Cities and towns share in the state’s revenues when times are good, but they also must share in the belt-tightening when times are bad,” he said. The budget cuts were often deep and painful, but Barbara Anderson, the antitax activist who had begged Romney to run for governor, identified a trade-off. “What people don’t credit him for,” she said, “is what he prevented from happening . . . a [broad-based] tax increase.”

  From the outset, Romney’s team maintained tight control of information and displayed a disciplined, centralized management style. The administration spoke with one voice, usually Romney’s. Assisted by Boston-based management consultants, they scoured the bureaucracy, culling data in a search for inefficiency, waste, and savings. That work provided the basis for what Romney would tout as “the most significant restructuring of state government in half a century.” Sensing a mandate, the new governor pursued bold goals. He aimed to overhaul the sprawling human services system, a court network beset by legislative meddling and patronage, and the twenty-nine-campus public higher education system. At the same time, he wanted to loosen the teachers unions’ influence on public education and fix a troubled state program that helped cities and towns finance school building and repair projects. Some changes Romney could make himself, by executive order. His cuts to the state bureaucracy, however, turned out to be fairly modest. After four years, he reduced the payroll of agencies under his direct control by 603 jobs, according to his administration’s tally. By contrast, a Republican predecessor, William F. Weld, had closed state hospitals, privatized services, and slashed about 7,700 jobs during his first term, though the numbers had later increased when the economy improved.