The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  Many other moves to reform state government required legislative support, and there Romney often faltered. That was partly because he showed little interest in the lawmakers themselves. He and his brainy, idealistic staff seemed too often blind to the fact that sweeping reforms, even if they made great sense in a white paper, counted for nothing unless the spadework had been done to cultivate legislative support. Romney, never a backslapper, invested little in building such ties—or even in getting to know the players. And so his court consolidation plan went nowhere, his vision for higher education vanished almost without a trace. Only pieces of his grand plan became law. A frequent complaint was that Romney, unlike previous Republican governors, rarely made an effort to develop meaningful relationships with the rank and file. Weld, for example, had once traded his support for a legislative pay raise in return for a promise by legislative leaders to cut the capital gains tax. “Weld had a genuine curiosity about the people in the building and what made them tick, and how to develop functional relationships that proved to be productive in the clinch,” said Thomas Finneran, a Democrat who was House speaker for the first twenty-one months of Romney’s term. “Romney was considerably more reserved.”

  A fellow Democratic lawmaker put it more pointedly: “You remember Richard Nixon and the imperial presidency? Well, this was the imperial governor.” There were the ropes that often curtailed access to Romney and his chambers. The elevator settings that restricted access to his office. The tape on the floor that told people exactly where to stand during events. This was the controlled environment that Romney created. His orbit was his own. “We always would talk about how, among the legislators, he had no idea what our names were—none,” the lawmaker said. “Because he was so far removed from the day-to-day operations of state government.”

  Even as some of his sweeping initiatives ran headlong into political reality, Romney remained certain about his path. And there was nothing he was surer of than his vision for economic growth. “My program for creating jobs is second to none in the entire history of this state,” he said during the gubernatorial campaign. But he inherited a brittle economy; few states had been hit harder by the collapse of the tech bubble than Massachusetts. The state lost about 200,000 jobs, or nearly 6 percent of its workforce, between February 2001 and December 2003, the end of his first year in office. Then the climate began to gradually improve. Through it all, Romney was heavily involved in trying to sell business leaders on Massachusetts. A spokesman said he met each year with an average of about fifty chief executive officers who were considering expanding or locating in the state. Still, by the end of Romney’s term, fewer than 40,000 net new jobs had been generated statewide, about a 1 percent increase. It was the fourth weakest rate of job growth of all states over the same period—a testament, ultimately, to the gap between what elected leaders say they will do about job growth and what they can actually do.

  Nonetheless, Romney gets credit in some quarters for improving the state’s competitiveness. His administration streamlined the public approval process to help businesses expand and revived an agency charged with recruiting businesses to Massachusetts. Under Ranch C. Kimball, a self-described “Romney Democrat” who succeeded Robert Pozen as secretary of economic development in 2004, the number of companies in the Massachusetts development pipeline jumped from 13 to 288 in three years, though much of that was driven by the recovering economy and the rise of the biotechnology and life sciences sector. In 2006, Bristol-Myers Squibb chose an eighty-nine-acre site northwest of Boston over one in North Carolina for a $750 million complex, which, as of the summer of 2011, employed more than three hundred people. The deal required tax credits, other state assistance, and an unusual show of teamwork by two reluctant playmates, Romney and the legislature.

  Through it all, Romney remained something of a reluctant political negotiator. Instead of pushing his agenda through closed-door appeals to legislators, he favored well-orchestrated media events to generate public pressure. They were often heavy on stagecraft and carefully choreographed by his aides. “His theory of government was ‘I’m going to the bully pulpit, which is the press, and beat you up so you succumb to my position,’ ” said Salvatore DiMasi, a Democrat who served as House speaker during most of Romney’s term. (DiMasi would later become a symbol of the kind of deal making Romney sought to avoid; he was sentenced to an eight-year prison term after a corruption conviction in 2011.)

  Romney’s gifts as a communicator produced some triumphs. One was a bill on repeat drunken drivers that he and his lieutenant governor, Kerry Healey, prodded lawmakers to toughen in 2005 by enlisting family members of victims to make emotional televised appeals. Another came when Romney refused to sign a retroactive increase in the state’s capital gains tax approved by the legislature in 2005 that would have affected 48,000 taxpayers. Romney’s objections lit up the radio talk shows, and lawmakers backed down. He possessed, too, an instinct for the grand gesture, as he demonstrated after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Romney was unusually critical of the country’s fumbled response under President Bush, calling it “an embarrassment,” and he offered to take in thousands of evacuees on Cape Cod, where he set up an entire makeshift town on a military base. In the end, only 235 people were sent to Massachusetts. But Romney committed the state to helping anyone it could. “They’re going to find it warm here, and hospitable,” he said, “and they’re going to find the people of Massachusetts have great big hearts.”

  One of his longest-running battles with the legislature was over the Big Dig, the beleaguered Boston highway project that became a symbol of patronage and mismanagement. Romney had twice sought control of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, the quasi-independent agency that oversaw the project, but had been rebuffed by the legislature, where the authority’s chairman, former Republican state senator Matthew J. Amorello, had important friends. Then a tragedy changed everything. On the night of July 10, 2006, heavy concrete ceiling panels fell onto a car driving through a Big Dig tunnel. Milena Del Valle, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three from Boston, was killed.

  Within hours, Amorello was at the scene, where he remained as morning broke, briefing investigators, reviewing the accident with the state attorney general, and coordinating with state police. Romney aides had called Amorello’s office, saying the governor wanted to see him. But before Amorello could make his way to the statehouse, Romney lost his patience, incensed that Amorello hadn’t shown up yet. So Romney, his blood boiling, went to Amorello. He arrived at the scene and darted toward Amorello with an outstretched hand. In the bizarre seconds that followed, Romney, visibly agitated, gave Amorello a handshake, grabbed his shoulder with one hand, and then slapped him on the chest with the other. “You’re too big for the governor?” Romney said, according to one witness to the exchange. “You’re too big for the governor?”

  Amorello and others around them were taken aback. “I’m standing there in shock,” the witness said. “It was really something to see.” As Romney and Amorello started walking awkwardly together down into the tunnel, the witness said, Romney’s rant continued, before Amorello tried to calm him down by reminding him that a woman had just been killed. Asked later about their heated exchange, which had been caught from afar by TV cameras, Romney said he had expressed “disappointment” with Amorello at his snub. “And so, if you will, the mountain went to Mohammed,” Romney said.

  For years, the public had been troubled by cost overruns and design problems on the megaproject. Now the abstractions turned into a real threat: commuters were, for a time, afraid to venture into the warren of tunnels underneath the city. Romney had public opinion on his side. Three days after the accident, the legislature handed him emergency powers over the tunnel project. Amorello soon resigned. Immediately, Romney became a commanding and reassuring presence. The legendary quick study was on the case, demonstrating a stunning mastery of complicated engineering details. He unveiled plans for inspections and
repairs. He vowed to restore public confidence. This, even many critics had to admit, was the take-charge CEO Massachusetts voters had elected in 2002. “At a moment of crisis, he exercised significant leadership,” said David Luberoff, the coauthor of a book about the Big Dig and other megaprojects. Romney seemed to relish his role. When the accident happened, he was at his vacation home in New Hampshire and had to return to Boston. Tony Kimball, Romney’s former colleague in local Mormon leadership, remembered running into Romney’s middle son, Josh, at some point afterward. “Josh said, ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen my dad not really mad to have to go back,’ ” Kimball recalled.

  He was, in almost every way, Mitt Romney’s perfect foil. William M. Bulger, a former president of the state Senate, was a cunning and erudite Democratic pol from South Boston. A powerful figure during forty-two years in state government, Bulger enjoyed support among Democrats in the legislature, but his reputation for arrogance and Boston parochialism did not wear well with the general public. He was also weakened by embarrassing disclosures about his contact with his brother, the mobster James “Whitey” Bulger, who had been accused of nineteen murders and, at the time, was still a fugitive.

  In his first year as governor, Romney zeroed in on Bulger, trying to break up the five-campus University of Massachusetts system and eliminating the office of president, which Bulger held. Major industries in the state objected, however, and the legislature thwarted the move. But Romney had a Plan B. Before Romney took office, Bulger had invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege before a congressional committee investigating the FBI’s use of informants, his brother “Whitey” being among the most notorious. In June 2003, William Bulger faced a climactic second congressional appearance, testifying under a grant of immunity. Days before the hearing, State Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly broke ranks with Democrats and called for Bulger to resign from his state post. The next day, Romney, who resented Bulger’s lack of cooperation with authorities, said he might call on the University of Massachusetts trustees to remove him.

  After trustees rebuffed Romney, praising Bulger’s job performance, Romney began to frame the conflict in moral terms, saying that Bulger, as a public university leader, should be held to “a much higher standard” even if he had committed no crime. The chairwoman of the trustees, Grace K. Fey, Bulger, and other backers on the board worried that the higher education system would suffer retaliation by Romney if Bulger survived. Lawyers negotiated an expensive buyout of the remaining four years on his contract, and he resigned. It was a triumph of the Beacon Hill newcomer over the ultimate insider. To Romney, that was what accountability looked like.

  Romney had no personal relationship with Bulger as he pushed him out the door. William P. Monahan was a different story, one that illustrates Romney’s allergy to controversy and willingness to cut loose even loyal associates if they threaten to sully his reputation. Three weeks after Bulger’s exit, Monahan’s long personal and political relationship with Romney ended abruptly with a thirteen-minute phone call. Romney forced Monahan out as chairman of the state Civil Service Commission just a month after he appointed him. His hasty ouster was engineered by aides who feared that the governor would be embarrassed by a Boston Globe story about Monahan’s purchase of property from Boston organized crime figures twenty-three years earlier. From his lake house in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Romney called Monahan, who recalled Romney saying, “Bill, my stomach is turning. . . . My senior staff is unanimous that I have to ask for your resignation. I don’t want to do this, but I am outvoted.” Embittered, the lawyer and former Belmont town leader filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against Romney and others, seeking reinstatement. “He threw me under the bus,” recalled Monahan, who had been a backer of Romney’s political campaigns and a leading supporter of efforts by the Mormon church to build the Belmont temple. “When he needed me, I was always there.”

  Citing the litigation, Romney in 2007 declined to discuss the case in detail. He said that, had he known the full scope of Monahan’s business dealings, he would never have appointed him in the first place. A federal court judge found in favor of Romney and his aides in September 2009.

  Romney’s relative coldness toward state lawmakers while in the State House did not extend to James Vallee. At least not initially. Vallee, a Democrat who chaired a key House committee, was one of the few legislators with whom Romney cultivated a relationship. Vallee had fought for high-profile bills that the governor backed. “The first couple of years, he’d call me on my cell phone and we met maybe a dozen times,” Vallee said. “He supported me when I was going against the grain of my own colleagues.”

  But then Vallee lost his chairmanship, he said, and Romney stopped calling. Still, a few days before he left office, Romney thanked Vallee and asked whether there was anything he could do for him. The legislature had passed a measure awarding Vallee’s hometown an additional liquor license, and all it needed was Romney’s signature. So Vallee asked for it. “I’ll take care of it before I leave,” he quoted Romney as saying, though Romney would later contend that he did not recall the conversation. When Romney departed, the petition lay in a stack of last-minute bills left unsigned on his desk. “It was not a two-way street,” Vallee said of the relationship.

  This is consistent with how others who have worked with or watched Romney closely describe him: as a utilitarian who sometimes views others purely in terms of their value to him and his goals. “Mitt is always the star,” said one fellow Republican. “And everybody else is a bit player.” Indeed, Romney was, in many ways, a solo act, and his obsession with staying above the fray irked many State House regulars. They were accustomed to the transactional culture that has long permeated Massachusetts politics. Votes were traded. Political supporters were awarded state jobs. Family members of politicians were appointed to lucrative positions. And pension deals rewarded the well connected. That, quite literally, wasn’t a language Romney spoke. When he used words like “poophead” and “gosh” in place of coarser constructions, hard-bitten political veterans rolled their eyes, as if to say, Who is this guy?

  Over the course of Romney’s term, Democratic lawmakers came to understand that it wasn’t even worth approaching him for a favor. “I never asked the governor for anything political, never,” said Robert Travaglini, the Senate president during Romney’s tenure. “I’ve observed him, and never once did he demonstrate to me that that was part of his tool set.” But although Romney’s relative detachment was, at times, a hindrance, it also presented a healthy challenge to a stagnant, insular political culture. “He forced all of us to bring our A game to the table,” Travaglini said as Romney ended his term. “Say what you will about the man, to some degree he initiated the action and direction on reform. . . . He brought out the best of us here in the Senate.”

  One change Romney made was sanitizing the judicial selection process, requiring a nominating panel to conduct an initial blind review of candidates without knowing their names, gender, or references. “The review process was completely apolitical,” said Ralph C. Martin II, who chaired the state Judicial Nominating Commission for half of Romney’s term. A July 2005 review of Romney’s judicial picks by The Boston Globe detected no philosophical or partisan pattern. Indeed, Romney, who had all the information about judicial candidates when making his final selections, had filled three-quarters of thirty judicial vacancies with registered Democrats or independents, including two gay lawyers who had supported expanded same-sex rights. He similarly showed no evident preference for candidates who had contributed to his campaign.

  Romney’s distaste for crony politics was perfectly in character, another manifestation of his determined personal rectitude. But it was something very different in the State House, producing an administration that was virtually scandal-free and comparatively restrained in the exercise of patronage. “He never sent me anyone he wanted hired and never said, ‘This is a major donor, see what you can do for him,’ ” Foy recalled. Romney gave a similar
message to Daniel B. Winslow, who became his legal counsel. “He said, ‘You will have lots of people calling you up to get their Uncle Oscar a job on the legal team,’ ” recalled Winslow, who served about two years under Romney. “ ‘Don’t do that,’ he said. ‘I need the best and brightest lawyers without regard to politics.’ ” It was not, as with many public figures, an image-buffing quote aimed at posterity. It was what Romney actually expected.

  As governor, Romney did give jobs to many of his own campaign workers, but he was aggressive in ousting longtime operatives of his own Republican Party, including David Balfour, the head of the Metropolitan District Commission, a patronage haven that Romney would fold into another state agency. Much later, Romney rebuffed requests that he appoint Brian P. Lees, the Republican leader in the Senate, to the open job of clerk-magistrate of a district court in western Massachusetts. “I wanted to change the environment in Massachusetts from one of patronage to one of people getting jobs on the merit,” Romney explained. “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.”