The Real Romney

by Kranish, Michael

  Dr. Richard Land, one of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, awoke at his hotel at 5 a.m. and headed to the airport in Lubbock, Texas, anxious to fulfill his agreement to join other evangelicals at the meeting with Romney. In his role as head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Liberty Commission, Land was often cited as the most recognizable and respected voice in his denomination, which counts 16 million members in 42,000 churches in the United States. With his deep basso voice, ample girth, and blunt-spoken manner, he loomed large on any stage where presidential politics was discussed. Like many in his faith, Land questioned whether Mormons were Christian. He had said Mormonism might be considered a “fourth Abrahamic religion,” the others being Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But Land also believed that there should be—in Thomas Jefferson’s famous words—a “wall of separation” between church and state. It was the persecution of Virginia Baptists that had helped convince Jefferson that government should not interfere with religion. Mormons, too, believed they had been persecuted by government—Romney’s own great-grandfather had been pursued by armed U.S. forces seeking to arrest him on polygamy charges. Romney might never convince Land and other Southern Baptists of the virtues of Mormonism. But it was reasonable to believe that he and Land could agree about the need to keep the institutions of government and the church separate and that the concerns about Romney’s religion would then begin to fade away.

  As Land listened to his fellow evangelical leaders question Romney, one of them put the matter directly: “You do understand, Governor, that most evangelicals don’t accept Mormonism as an orthodox Trinitarian faith?” Romney replied that he was well aware of that and assured Land and the others that he would keep his Mormon faith out of political decisions. Land then urged Romney to give a speech assuring Americans that his Mormonism would not influence him in the White House—and deliver it soon, preferably in Iowa. To underscore his point, Land showed Romney a copy of John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 address to Houston ministers, which Land considered a well-worded assurance by Kennedy that his decisions would not be influenced by the Catholic Church. Make a speech like that, Land said. Romney promised to think about it. As the meeting came to a close, the men and women bowed their heads. A prayer was said for Romney and his prospective presidential campaign. Shortly afterward, Colonial-style chairs were shipped to all of those who had attended. The chairs had an engraved brass plate on the back that said, “There is always a place for you at our table—Mitt Romney.”

  Confident now that they could swing Christian conservatives their way, the Romney team settled on their strategy. Instead of avoiding social issues and keeping a distance from evangelicals, Romney would “dive right” and bet on winning in a place where evangelicals held extraordinary power: the first-caucus state of Iowa. If Romney could win there, the Mormon issue would be off the table, and Romney might be on the path toward the nomination.

  They called it “Romney World,” a campaign headquarters that filled the former Roche Bobois furniture store at 585 Commercial Street, a three-story gray-and-tan North End waterfront building. The windows in Romney’s top-floor corner office provided sweeping views of Boston Harbor, the Leonard P. Zakim Bridge, and the Bunker Hill Monument. In prominent positions, pictures of George Romney were always the exemplar, in success and failure, for his son. Romney World was more than a physical location; it described a state of loyalty to Romney among his closest advisers that would be matched by few campaigns. To those even slightly outside this inner circle, getting through to the candidate seemed nearly impossible. At the head of this group, with an office next door to Romney’s, sat Beth Myers. She had served as the governor’s chief of staff for four years and was now charged with managing a national campaign, something she had never done.

  It had long been presumed that Mike Murphy, Romney’s political guru in his 2002 campaign, would reprise that role in 2008. He was renowned for a wisecracking and sometimes outrageous style that seemed at odds with the buttoned-down Romney. He relished playing the role of an inverse Romney, with his casual appearance, but was also like the candidate in his self-certitude. Romney aides variously called Murphy the campaign “Svengali,” “mastermind,” “alter ego,” and a number of other double-edged superlatives. Just as Karl Rove was considered “Bush’s brain” during George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, Murphy was the muscle behind Mitt.

  Murphy’s success came partly from his ability to convince recalcitrant candidates to run negative attack ads against opponents, sometimes by leavening the commercials with humor. It was Murphy who, in his role as Romney’s consultant in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, had told Romney that Murphy’s own soft-and-fuzzy family ads weren’t working and convinced Romney to attack rival Shannon O’Brien. Romney, in his book Turnaround, credited Murphy with “sheer brilliance” and called him “hilarious.” Murphy, meanwhile, was ensconced in his modern home atop Laurel Canyon, with its vista of the Los Angeles Basin, where he split his time between screenwriting and plotting Romney’s presidential bid. Even when Murphy tried to give a convoluted explanation for Romney’s turnabout on abortion—telling the conservative National Review that Romney had been “a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly”—Romney stood by Murphy and accepted the explanation that the comment had been taken out of context.

  In the early stages of Romney’s presidential bid, it was widely understood that Murphy would be the lead strategist and bless the choice of campaign manager. Indeed, Murphy had already assured Romney that he was on board, and a number of Murphy associates had joined the team. Only one thing would upset the plan: Murphy had long worked for McCain. If McCain once again sought the presidency and ran against Romney, Murphy said he would not choose between them and thus would work for neither man. And so, when McCain announced he was in, Murphy called Romney and said: I’m out.

  Murphy’s departure would be widely lamented among top Romney aides outside the Boston inner circle. Doug Gross, the Iowa campaign chairman, had employed Murphy in his own failed run for the governorship of Iowa and knew how important the adviser had been to Romney. “Mike Murphy grew up in the streets of Detroit and understands what people think and what motivates them. Mitt Romney doesn’t because he’s not an average person in any respect.” Without Murphy, “Romney had to rely on his own instincts” and heard conflicting advice from an array of advisers, none of whom had Murphy’s influence, Gross said.

  Romney authorized a search for someone who could run his campaign, and his top aides interviewed more than a half dozen of the nation’s most experienced campaign managers. One by one, however, they said no—most because they could not meet the requirement to drop everything for a year or so and move to Boston. Attention turned to Myers. “Beth said, ‘I don’t want to be the campaign manager, and I certainly don’t want to be the strategist.’ She said that a hundred times,” according to a Romney aide involved in the search. “She didn’t seek the job; the job backed into her because there was no one else.”

  Throughout the campaign, Myers would be the subject of much criticism by Romney’s state-level advisers. But her defenders stressed that she had accepted a difficult job when others would not and that she was always carrying out Romney’s mandate. Myers directed a strategy that relied heavily on doing well in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire, Michigan, Nevada, South Carolina, and Florida. The mantra was “Win early and win often.” Raising huge amounts of money, meanwhile, was expected to be no problem. The campaign set out to demonstrate Romney’s credibility by hosting a one-day fund-raising marathon on January 8, 2007, five days after Romney filed presidential exploratory committee papers. Romney ended the day with pledges for a stunning $6.5 million.

  Speaking to reporters that day, Romney was asked about the possibility that he would have to use his own money to help finance his campaign. That, Romney said, would be “akin to a nightmare.” Romney and his staff did not disclose that the candidate had already written checks
totaling about $2.4 million. Later, when it was revealed that he had drawn heavily on his personal funds, an aide was quoted in The Boston Globe as saying that he was giving the money only temporarily. “A loan’s a loan,” the aide said. “That was just to start up.” In fact, Romney eventually loaned his campaign $45 million, and, after the race was over, his staff admitted that the so-called loans would never be repaid.

  The campaign team under Myers was now set. The same could not be said for Romney’s message. Nowhere was this problem more evident than in a state Romney was absolutely counting on winning—New Hampshire—and with a man he had personally recruited to chair his campaign there: Bruce Keough.

  Keough was a real estate developer who had been elected to the state Senate from Exeter. He had run unsuccessfully for governor of New Hampshire the same year Romney had been elected governor of Massachusetts. When Romney had first approached him to head up his Granite State effort, Keough had been intrigued but had a gnawing concern: what is the Romney message? He had urged Romney to focus on his reputation as an economic “Mr. Fix-it,” someone who could transfer his talent for streamlining businesses into reshaping Washington. Romney had responded that it would be premature to settle on that message, saying, as Keough recalled it, “It is very early; who knows what the major issues of the day will be by the time we get to primaries?”

  But Keough believed it wasn’t too early; nothing was more important for Romney than to establish himself as the candidate who would turn the economy around. Romney kept on courting Keough, capping his effort at dinner at an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End. Keough eventually agreed to become the chairman of Romney’s New Hampshire campaign and went to Romney’s Boston headquarters for a meeting of top campaign officials from the early-voting states, including Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. Almost immediately, he said, there were “red flags.” He reiterated his concerns about the candidate’s message. He worried that the Romney team was focused more on building a campaign infrastructure than a rationale for the candidacy. Keough also thought that Romney was too focused on courting social conservatives. A strong pushback about this strategy came not only from top staff in New Hampshire (the nation’s second-least-churchgoing state after Vermont, according to the Gallup Poll) but also from the more socially conservative bastions of Iowa and South Carolina. In all three cases, top campaign officials urged the Romney team at Boston headquarters to focus more on an economic message.

  Iowa chairman Doug Gross and senior adviser Richard Schwarm—both of whom had been at the initial Ritz-Carlton dinner with Romney at which Gross had grilled the candidate—tried to convince the campaign of the pitfalls of running to the right on social issues, noting that many conservative Iowans, not to mention radio talk-show hosts, were not willing to accept that a former supporter of abortion rights was now “prolife.” Schwarm said, “That was an argument that Doug and I had with the campaign over and over again.” But Romney’s Boston team said it understood Iowa and was sticking to its strategy.

  The attack on the campaign strategy was soon joined by advisers in other key states. Romney’s South Carolina team wrote an extraordinary four-page memo to Myers in which they essentially pleaded with the campaign to stop focusing on social issues and push the economic message. The memo noted that a number of politicians in South Carolina had been successful by focusing on that theme, that there was a “void” for such a candidate, and that Romney fit this role perfectly. “Every time Governor Romney talks about social issues, the flip-flopper accusations have been and will continue to be mentioned,” the memo said. All that Romney had to do was “be acceptable to the pro-life crowd,” not be its “champion.” The concerns of the South Carolina team became so great that, several months later, they took the unusual step of insisting upon a private meeting with Romney to relay their fears. Meeting at a hotel during one of Romney’s trips to the state capital, Columbia, two top South Carolina advisers told Romney that his continued effort to cast himself as a true social conservative was backfiring. Romney responded that he appreciated their concerns. But one of the South Carolina campaign officials at the meeting still didn’t see much change and eventually became convinced that Romney “didn’t want to deal with it.”

  On February 13, 2007, a beaming Mitt Romney formally announced his candidacy in a setting designed to evoke the ties between him and his father. Striding onto the stage at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, he seemed a world away from the state he had governed. Instead, he was in the place where he had grown up and where his father had served as governor. An antique Nash Rambler, the original compact car that George Romney had staked his reputation on while serving as chairman of American Motors, was parked on one side of the candidate. A new Ford hybrid—a symbol of innovation—was parked on the other. Mitt then began to talk about about his relationship with his father and about himself. “Dad and I loved cars,” he said. “Most kids read the sports box scores. Dad and I read Automotive News. We came here together, him teaching me about cars that were built way before my time.”

  Throughout his campaign, one of the most asked questions would be: Who is the “real Romney?” Is he the moderate who once supported abortion rights or the self-described prolife Reaganite running for the presidency? Perhaps a clue was somewhere in that tableau on announcement day. His father had studied the automobile market and determined that there was demand for a compact car in an era better known for wide-bodied behemoths. Now here was the younger Romney, applying a business model to politics, shifting and adapting as the market of public opinion required. In business, changing positions in an evolving market can be the secret of survival. In politics, it can brand you a “flip-flopper.” Romney’s challenge was to show that his shifts were not expedient but reasoned and heartfelt. He argued that shifting gears represented an ability to innovate, not an uncertain core. And Washington needed innovation. In his speech he emphasized that point, using some variation of the word “transform” thirteen times.

  Publicly, the Romney team expressed delight with the kickoff. They were just about alone in that feeling. A couple of weeks later, as Romney and his staff were traveling from an event to a local airport, a press aide pulled up an e-mail on his BlackBerry. A new ABC-TV/Washington Post poll had just been released, the aide blurted out. Romney was at 4 percent, down from 9 percent a month earlier. The leader was Rudy Giuliani at 44 percent; McCain was at 21 percent; and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who did not end up becoming a candidate, was at 15 percent. The press aide later recalled that as soon as he uttered the phrase “four percent,” he knew it had been a mistake to speak out. He felt as if everyone in the van were looking straight through him. The only good news was that four out of ten people surveyed had no opinion about Romney. The campaign team needed to fill in the blanks. And stop the bleeding.

  Romney’s campaign faced a conundrum. The candidate’s most obvious qualification for the presidency, beyond his business background, was that he was perceived to be a successful governor. But that success had been costly. He had won office by taking relatively moderate positions, and he had had to work with a host of liberal legislators in Boston and Washington to get things accomplished. To many conservative Republicans, Romney’s success in working with liberal Democrats wasn’t anything to be celebrated. It made him suspect.

  Running against Kennedy in 1994 and for governor in 2002, Romney had sought to win over voters who favored abortion rights, and he had acknowledged during his presidential campaign that he once had been “effectively prochoice.” He had also been supportive of gay rights, though not for gay marriage. And his signature achievement, the passage of a state health care bill that required nearly all residents to have insurance, sounded to some conservatives too similar to the proposals that Democratic presidential candidates wanted to be passed by Congress. The Romney team tried to address concerns about his years as governor by touting his record as evidence of his turnaround skills. They came up with an ad that
portrayed Romney as “the Republican governor who turned around a Democratic state.” It was an adroit pivot, but it was far from convincing to the conservative audience he was aiming at.

  In the end, the Massachusetts message was something of a muddle, with Romney constantly trying to explain—or explain away—his positions. The real Romney, increasingly, seemed to be someone who didn’t know where he stood or, worse, someone who would shift on core issues with the campaign winds.

  Romney’s team was also concerned that his wealth would turn voters off. Indeed, the third “M” in their trio of worries—millionaire—understated things. Romney’s 2007 financial disclosure form pegged his wealth at between $190 million and $250 million. On paper, he seemed more at home on Wall Street than Main Street, more at ease with hedge fund managers than discussing the everyday concerns of voters. All that money, of course, had an upside: he could afford to quickly begin airing television ads. The campaign decided to start running ads unusually early—nearly a year before the first caucus or primary—seeking to define him as a job creator, business leader, family man, and above-the-fray politician.

  An analysis of advertising during the Republican primaries, conducted by the Nielsen ratings firm, shows the extraordinary extent to which Romney relied on this strategy. From February to September 2007, Romney ran 10,866 television advertising spots, mostly in Iowa. During the same seven-month period, McCain ran five, and Huckabee and Giuliani ran none. The ad blitz boosted Romney’s name recognition and poll numbers. Romney was moving forward, step by step. Even if the polls demonstrated more about name identification than deep support, progress seemed real. It gave the campaign confidence to push ahead with its all-out effort to win Iowa.

  Despite the flood of ads and months of campaigning, Romney was still an enigma to many Iowa voters. Some eliminated him as a candidate based on his abortion flip-flop, and the campaign eventually realized that such voters were probably lost. But those who saw Romney as just another calculating politician might still be won over, if they could be convinced his rethinking of his views was sincere and evidence of his analytical cast of mind. Spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom explained Romney’s mind-set in a particularly revealing comment to The Des Moines Register: “He’s not a very notional leader. He is more interested in data, and what the data mean.” The use of the word “notional” was telling. Fehrnstrom’s comment apparently sought to highlight Romney’s belief in facts over theories, but it may have left some voters questioning whether Romney saw himself as a man of big ideas, typically an ingredient in a successful campaign.