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Mitt Vs. Mitt Want to know what Mitt thinks about Abortion, Or Health
care, etc? Just wait a few minutes and he will flip around to whatever
opinion is popular.
Mitt Romney's been keeping
himself at arm's length from the 2012 campaign, perhaps wisely
recognizing that a Mitt Romney candidacy is more effective when there's
not that much Mitt Romney in it.
When it comes to facing his GOP rivals, Romney ... well, he doesn't face
them. He acts as if they don't exist. If he has to talk about them, he's
typically pretty charitable. Instead, his focus has been on Obama.
Romney has already projected himself into the future, finding himself
the GOP nominee.
It will be interesting to see if Rick Perry can get into his head --
part of that Bernanke kerfuffle was designed to do just that, as Romney
generically supports Bernanke. But if Mitt stays true to form, then his
strategy to deal with Perry will be to put him on fade.
The way Romney's been keeping himself offstage confused reporters for a
brief moment. There was that whole "Mittness Protection Program" thing
that everyone tried to make happen a few weeks ago, but Romney couldn't
be swayed.
Now, the Romney coverage is swinging back around to affirming his
strategy -- which we have been affirming for a long time. We can break
it down into three parts:
[Romney's] doing what establishment
candidates do, trying to limit his early exposure and create an air
of inevitability, and seeking to win over enough of the base to win
the nomination -- but not in a way that gives his establishment
backers pause about his electability. Historically, this has been a
pretty sound strategy for the "next in line" Republican candidate.
The knock on Romney, though, is that this is (supposedly) a bad
strategy in the political climate of 2011 and 2012. With the
election of Barack Obama, the GOP base was radicalized almost
overnight, as it seems to be whenever a Democrat wins the White
House. But the anger of the Obama era GOP base is also unique, in
that it's not just directed at the ruling Democrats but also at
Republican leaders. It was this base that insisted on nominating
unelectable candidates for Senate races in Nevada, Colorado,
Delaware and Alaska. And it's this base, a popular line of thinking
goes, that will never accept Romney in 2012 -- even if the
establishment closes rank around him: There's too much doubt about
his ideological purity, and his Massachusetts healthcare plan, with
its individual mandate, is just too similar to "ObamaCare."
But something funny has been playing out. All year, there's been
talk that Romney's campaign is facing imminent collapse -- a
tailspin like the one McCain faced in the middle of 2007, except
this time with no miraculous comeback. And all year, he's defied the
predictions, faring far better than the doubters expected.
GOP Presidential candidate Mitt
Romney has settled on a rather low-key strategy of avoiding
controversy, even as he allows his rivals to all discredit
themselves with outlandish statements.
If the last 24 hours are any indication, there's something to this
approach. In a single day, almost all of his opponents have said
something that has attracted negative national media attention and
should be raising real concerns among GOP establishment figures
about their fitness for the presidential campaign.
[...]
Just about the only Republican presidential candidate who hasn't
said anything ridiculous in the last 24 hours is Mitt Romney. It's a
low bar to clear, but for a candidate who obviously has his eyes on
winning the general election and not just the Republican primary,
it's also something of a vindication. And, hey, it might work even
in the primary: If Romney can stand by while his opponents implode
-- without getting drawn into the whackiness himself -- enough GOP
primary voters just may decide he's the last electable candidate
standing.
Mitt Romney is finally facing an
opponent who looks capable of halting his march to the GOP
nomination.
With his record of job creation and down-the-line conservative
politics, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is menacing the Republican
front-runner in a way that other candidates -- from Iowa straw poll
winner Michele Bachmann to wealthy New Hampshire-dweller Jon
Huntsman -- have proven unable to do.
[...]
But you wouldn't know it from listening to Romney or his backers.
It's not that they don't take Perry seriously. Rather, Romney's
supporters believe the Bay Stater's tortoise-like strategy will play
to one of his essential strengths -- durability over the long haul
-- and show Republican primary voters that he's best prepared to go
up against a vulnerable incumbent president.
That's why since Perry joined the 2012 race last weekend, Romney and
his advisers have been conspicuously gentle with the newest
presidential candidate. On a visit to New Hampshire, Romney told
reporters that his business experience -- "having worked in the real
economy" -- would give him an advantage over Perry. But Romney did
little to disparage his just-announced challenger.
And how is Romney doing in New
Hampshire?
Quite well, just
like always.
Ariana Huffington of the
huffingtonreport.com published a
piece today:
"Mitt Romney's brazenly dishonest ad
is far from the garden-variety truth
stretching we're used to in
political campaigns. It is so
breathtakingly cynical it should
cause us to question whether a
candidate that would put it forth is
fit for any public office -- let
alone the presidency. Along with
being deceitful, the ad is also a
challenge to the media. It's like
when a toddler looks right at you
and slowly and deliberately spills a
glass of milk. The child wants to
see the reaction. It's a test of
boundaries. If there's no reaction,
then the message is that it's okay.
That Mitt Romney hasn't been forced
to apologize for this ad, that he
hasn't been forced to fire the team
responsible for it, isn't just a
failure of Romney's -- it's a
failure of our media culture."
Huntsman
campaign video: Romney flips like a toy monkey
By
Daniel Strauss -
10/28/11 03:49 PM ET
Jon Huntsman is ramping up his
criticism of Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper with a new campaign
ad.
The video, called "Backflip,"
features a split-screen: On one side is Romney, making
apparently contradictory statements — on issues like abortion
and an Ohio bill curtailing union bargaining rights — and on the
other a small wind-up toy monkey.
"I believe that abortion
should be safe and legal in this country," Romney says in a clip
from his campaign for governor of Massachussetts. The video then
cuts to Romney saying more recently he has "consistently been
pro-life."
The ad, released Friday, comes
the same day that Huntsman described Romney as a "perfectly
lubricated weathervane."
"While Mitt Romney has been doing
backflips on every issue from abortion to the individual
mandate, Gov. Huntsman has been consistent on where he stands,"
Huntsman spokesman Tim Miller said in a statement announcing the
video. "Leadership is not flipping back and forth on issues for
your own political advantage. Real leadership is taking a clear
position on issues even if it comes at political risk.
Backflipping is for toys and gymnasts, not presidents."
The ad and Huntsman's comments
are an aggressive push by the Huntsman campaign to capitalize on
recent criticism Romney has fielded from conservatives for being
inconsistent on certain issues. Recently, Huntsman was attacked
for appearing to reverse his position on the Ohion union
measure. On Tuesday Romney refused to say where he stood on the
bill.
A day later he said he fully
supported "Gov. Kasich's Question 2 in Ohio."
"I'm sorry if I created any confusion there," Romney said.
Also Huntsman's daughters
released a spoof campaign ad based on an unusual spot from
Herman Cain's presidential campaign. Cain has been competing
closely with Romney to lead the Republican presidential field in
the polls.
Meanwhile,
Romney is also being targeted in a
new ad
from
Priorities USA, a Super PAC standing
behind President Barack Obama's
reelection effort.
"Romney is worth as much as $250
million. But he only paid about 14
percent in federal taxes last year,"
says a narrator in the spot. "That's
less than what many middle-class
American families pay. American
families who are struggling to make
ends meet."
Excerpt
from an article posted on
huffingtonpost.com 10/21/11
Beer,
birth control, baby-making - oh my!
Rachel Maddow tore into Governor
Mitt Romney last night and took her
criticism of the GOP candidate (and,
really, all men in politics who have
debated issues relating to uteri) to
new heights on her Thursday show.
Maddow took
issue with what she saw as Romney's
failure to accurately answer a young
woman who questioned the Governor's
stance on birth control at an Iowa
town hall. Romney—a
favorite
target
of Maddow's— assumed the woman was
referring to his stance on abortion,
which he said he was against. But
the woman was actually referring to
what Romney has
previously
said he supports:
a so-called "personhood amendment"
that codifies life as beginning at
conception.
Many fear
that the language of such
amendments, which are currently on
the ballot in some states, could
lead to a ban on birth control.
After she played the clip of the
exchange, Maddow said, "Romney
apparently does not understand that
this is what he supports." She said
that the exchange reminded her about
the male domination of politics and
the media, and of the fact that
those men often find themselves
talking about women's bodies.
"Sometimes, I'm not sure they really
get it!" she almost shouted.
She then had her producers change
her usual blue background to a room
with a bar, large TV screen and big
leather sofa. Maddow turned what she
called her "man cave" into a special
Romney-themed cave, so her producers
included a graphic of a Harvard flag
and the Salt Lake City 2002 Olympics
logo. She popped open a beer and
told the ladies to leave so she
could talk "just to the fellas."
"It's very simple," Maddow said.
"This-is-how-a-baby-is-made." She
then launched into a full
description of the baby-making
process and even put up a diagram of
the female reproductive system
titled the "man cave's
not-too-upsetting guide to
down-there parts." She mockingly
went through three beers in the
process of explaining to men how
babies were made, how birth control
worked, and that sometimes people
engaged in sexual acts that could
lead to pregnancy even though they
don't want it to. "This is how the
birth control works that Mitt Romney
told Mike Huckabee he would like to
make illegal!" she cried,
criticizing government involvement
in "litigating the second-by-second
legal status of what is happening in
some guy's girlfriend's uterus on a
Friday night."
"I
know it's awkward to talk about
these things sometimes," Maddow
concluded. She also said that she
knew this was "very upsetting" but
felt it was warranted to talk sense
into men. "Criticize away," she told
her viewers.
WASHINGTON --
If campaigns have the
potential to become vehicles for candidates to advance
themselves financially, far more often they serve as veritable
bank accounts for associates or friends of those candidates.
Take, for instance, the latest financial disclosure reports for
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. From July 1 to Sept. 30,
the former Massachusetts governor paid more than $2.15 million
in fees to SJZ LLC, a financial consulting firm that manages the
campaign’s fundraising efforts nationwide.
SJZ LLC was founded by
Spencer Zwick, the national finance director for Romney's 2008
campaign and Romney's son Tagg's
current business partner
at the private equity firm Solamere Capital. That's on top of
the more than $666,000 the campaign paid SJZ LLC in the second
quarter of the campaign, and the nearly $1 million
it received from
Romney's Free and Strong America political action committee.
(It's worth noting that SJZ has done political work for other
campaigns in the past. Between March 2009 and January 2011, for
example, it was paid $1.4 million by Meg Whitman's failed
gubernatorial campaign in California.)
Zwick wasn't the only
Solamere official to be on the receiving end of Romney's
presidential campaign funds. John Miller, who is Romney's
National Finance Co-Chairman and an
operating partner
at Solamere, is also the Chief Executive Officer of JR Miller
Enterprises, an official at the company confirmed. A
JR Miller Enterprises affiliate,
JRM-C Management,
received a $12,391 check
from the Romney presidential campaign to pay for air travel on
August 19, 2011.
In other words:
According to the
flight manifest,
Miller likely rented out his corporate jet for a flight from
Utah, where Romney was
fundraising
at the time,
to San Diego
where Romney is renovating an oceanfront home.
That Romney would turn to
close associates and his son's business partners for campaign
assistance or a trip on a private jet is not unprecedented.
President Obama acted similarly when he paid millions of dollars
to David Axelrod's political consulting firm during the 2008
campaign.
But, as they were back then,
questions have been raised about both the type of relationship
resulting from these expenditures and whether it is ethical for
candidates to use donor money in this manner.
"It is not illegal, but
it sure doesn't smell right when it comes to politics," said Bob
Edgar, chief executive of Common Cause, a national nonprofit
advocacy group that first raised concerns about Romney's
Solamere connections
to theBoston Globe.
"They themselves have become
wealthy by using Romney's political activities over the past few
years," Edgar said. "I think the general public would question:
a. what is this all about, and b. How much is Spencer Zwick
making off of Romney, both with the equity firm but also
continuing to help him in the development area?"
Excerpts from an article posted
at politico.com by
Ben Smith on 8/10/11
Gov. Mitt Romney lobbied the credit
ratings agency Standard & Poor’s in 2004 to raise his state’s credit
rating in part because Massachusetts had raised taxes during an
economic downturn two years earlier.
The claim was part of a presentation
to the ratings agency obtained by POLITICO under a state freedom of
information law from the Massachusetts Executive Office of
Administration and Finance. The Nov. 4 presentation, stamped
“confidential,” helped persuade S&P to raise the state’s grade and
handed Romney the perfect talking point for last week’s humiliating
national downgrade by the same agency.
“When I was
governor, S&P rewarded Massachusetts with a credit rating upgrade
for our sound fiscal management and the underlying strength of our
economy,” Romney boasted. “That didn’t happen by accident. The
president’s failure to put the nation’s fiscal and economic house in
order has caused a massive loss of confidence that resulted in an
embarrassing downgrade.”
But Romney’s case to S&P is a far
cry from the anti-tax absolutism of the Republican Party he hopes to
lead. Indeed, it bears a far closer resemblance to the
right-of-center grand compromise rejected by House Republicans this
year — dismissed because it would include new taxes and end tax
breaks President Barack Obama described as “loopholes” — or the more
modest compromise that passed, than to the Cut, Cap, and Balance
plan Romney “applauded.”
The presentation to the ratings
agency reveals that Romney’s administration made the case to
Standard & Poor’s that his state was creditworthy because of both
spending cuts — the current preferred GOP method — and new revenues,
including fees he imposed and tax “loopholes” he closed. The
presentation also prominently cited a controversial set of tax
increases in the summer of 2002, which Romney, then a candidate, had
opposed.
The documents, 27 pages of
confidential “discussion materials” (Part
1,
2,
3,
4) and a
50-page
presentation
focused on the 2005 budget, don’t make clear whether Romney
participated in the presentation. Eric Kriss, who served as Romney’s
secretary of administration and finance, said he believed Romney and
his top aides had delivered the presentation on a conference call
with the ratings agency analysts.
Romney’s spokesman then and now,
Eric Fehrnstrom, said he wasn’t sure whether Romney was present, and
current Massachusetts officials were unable immediately to say,
though it would be typical for the executive to star at such a
high-stakes meeting.
And Romney said in a radio
interview Tuesday that he was proud of his personal involvement in
the process, in contrast to Obama. "The president really ought to
personally sit down and meet with S&P. I did that when I was
governor; I met with the ratings agencies and talked about our
future and tried to instill confidence in our future because, look,
how they rate our debt and how they rate our future as a nation will
affect the interest costs that we end up paying and will affect
homeowners and borrowers all over the country," he told the San
Diego station KCBQ.
The agency was duly impressed:
“Over the last few years, Massachusetts has taken certain actions
that have reduced budget uncertainty, reined in spending, and
prudently managed resources during a difficult national economic
slowdown,” Standard & Poor’s said in the March 2005 report in which
it upgraded Massachusetts to AA from AA-.
The 2004 presentation cuts to a
truth about the ratings that has been obscured in the current debate:
While raters may have some views on economic policy, their basic concern
is that government income is on track to pay government obligations. The
question of whether higher taxes or lower spending will produce that
outcome is secondary to their evaluation.
“When you’re talking to ratings agencies, you are
trying to emphasize your fiscal strengths irrespective of what might be
your long-term policy,” said Kriss, who said Romney had been “vehemently
opposed” to the tax increases despite their role in balancing the
budget.
Many observers
said Romney’s broader fiscal policy fit that technocratic,
budget-balancing mold.
The one-term governor was “focused on balancing the
budget and creating surpluses instead of spurring economic growth,” said
David Tuerck, executive director of the anti-tax, anti-regulation Beacon
Hill Institute, who added that while Romney had cut some taxes, one of
his greatest accomplishments was building up a large rainy-day fund. “He
erred in the direction of building up revenues in the stabilization fund
in place of moving toward a more robust policy of economic expansion.”
Romney, in his presentation to S&P, touted the growth
of that fund, and the combination of emergency spending cuts and new
revenues he’d used to fill it.
Massachusetts “successfully managed revenue and
expense positions” during a downturn in fiscal years 2002 and ’03, the
presentation said. “The commonwealth acted decisively to address the
fiscal crisis.”
The claims are followed by a chart indicating that the
state stayed solvent as tax collections plunged: “July 2002 —
Legislation to increase tax revenue” by more than $1 billion in each
fiscal year; a tax amnesty; and “tax ‘loophole’ legislation” worth $269
million.
The document also noted that the fiscal 2004 budget
“increased fees to raise $271 million yearly,” a move Romney’s critics
denounced at the time as a stealth tax.
New revenues amounted to a larger sum than the
emergency spending cuts of about $500 million that Romney touted, but
they weren’t the only element of the case for a ratings upgrade. Romney
also argued that the state had succeeded in shifting school construction
and other costs onto a more sustainable fiscal footing, and that he’d
avoided some of the questionable one-shot measures — like borrowing
against anticipated tobacco lawsuit payments — to which other states
resorted.
Romney’s aides, asked about the presentation, pointed
out that Romney, once he took office as governor in 2003, never signed a
tax increase, but instead passed on most of the fruits of an economic
boom to taxpayers in the form of tax cuts.
“Gov. Romney balanced
the budget primarily by cutting waste and inefficiency, by
streamlining and economizing, and by reducing nonessential
state spending,” said Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul in an
email. “Obama was talking about raising taxes.”
“At the time of Massachusetts’s upgrade,
[Romney] clearly said he was proud to have done it without
raising taxes and he cut taxes 19 times as governor,” she
said.
Romney’s aides also argued that Romney’s
loophole closures were more authentic than Obama’s. While
some of the tax breaks Obama would end are policy choices
aimed at boosting specific industries, Romney targeted what
his allies say amounted to mere corporate trickery — banks,
for instance, reclassifying themselves as real estate
companies in order to be taxed at a lower rate.
“Loophole closings are not tax increases.
Companies sometimes use aggressive accounting techniques to
lower their tax liability in ways that were never intended
by the law,” said Saul. “When that happened, the state
closed the loophole. That’s called tax enforcement.”
Local analysts didn’t buy that all of the
“loopholes” were that straightforward.
“He, like everybody, when they’re raising
corporate taxes, calls it ‘closing tax loopholes,’” said
Michael Widmer, president of the business-backed
Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. “A couple of these were
real loopholes but by and large they were increases in
corporate taxes by changes in tax policy.”
That dispute is relatively common in
fiscal policy. Harder to square with Romney’s public
rhetoric is the presentation’s blunt claim of credit — on
behalf of the Commonwealth, if not Romney — for the deeply
contested 2002 tax increase. Faced with declining revenues,
the Democratic-controlled Massachusetts Legislature passed a
package worth more than $1.1 billion dollars in new taxes.
They suspended planned cuts to the personal income tax,
sharply raised long-term capital gains tax rates, and added
a 75-cent tax to each pack of cigarettes.
The state estimated at the time that the
hikes would cost the average non-smoking resident $317 the
following year, while costing a pack-a-day smoker $592.
The measure passed over the veto of acting
Republican Gov. Jane Swift, and helped force her out of a
race for a full term. Romney ran a sharply anti-tax
campaign, benefiting from public anger at the increases,
though he opposed as too radical a ballot measure that would
have abolished the state’s income tax.
Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi
predicted in 2002 that Swift’s failure to stop the tax
increases would, in the end, appear as a favor to Romney:
“He can say he opposes the [income tax freeze] and the new
taxes; if elected he will benefit from both.”
His young
relative died tragically in an illegal abortion in 1963:
Her untold story -- and what it means for Romney
In a 1994 Senate
debate with Ted Kennedy, Mitt Romney revealed a startling
chapter from his past: A close relative had died many years
earlier in a botched illegal abortion, shaping Romney's
stance in favor of safe and legal access to abortion for all
women. But in the many years since that revelation, even as
Romney flipped his position and became an ardent opponent of
legal abortion, the details of his young relative's story,
including even her name, have never been reported.
The relative he was referring to back in
'94, Salon has learned, was a Detroit woman named Ann
Keenan. She was the sister of Romney's brother-in-law and
died at the age of 21 in 1963, a full decade before Roe v.
Wade. While much of what happened remains murky, an
investigation by Salon has uncovered never-reported details
about her life and death, including: how she died (an
infection); that her grief-stricken parents asked for
memorial donations to be made to Planned Parenthood; and
that the family apparently wanted to keep the death quiet
because Romney's politically ambitious father, George, was
then governor of Michigan.
With access
to abortion
increasingly restricted
in many states and the possibility that a Republican victory
in 2012 -- potentially by Romney -- will tilt the balance of
the Supreme Court against Roe v. Wade, Romney's account of
how a back-alley abortion touched his own family is more
relevant than ever. The episode is a window into an era when
obtaining an abortion meant the real risk of serious injury
or death. It also represents a key part of Romney's
political journey on the issue of abortion, which has more
than any other tarred him as a flip-flopper.
The outlines of the story first became
public when Romney -- unprompted -- brought it up in that
1994 debate with Kennedy, whom he was trying to unseat. At
the time, Romney, who was making his first bid for office,
was struggling to prove his pro-choice bona fides to liberal
Massachusetts voters. In the debate, he insisted that he
separated his personal beliefs -- opposition to abortion --
from his policy position that abortion "should be safe and
legal in this country." Accused by Kennedy of being
"multiple-choice," Romney angrily fired back:
"On the idea of 'multiple-choice,' I have
to respond. I have my own beliefs, and those beliefs are
very dear to me. One of them is that I do not impose my
beliefs on other people. Many, many years ago, I had a dear,
close family relative that was very close to me who passed
away from an illegal abortion. It is since that time that my
mother and my family have been committed to the belief that
we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs
on others on that matter. And you will not see me wavering
on that." Watch:
After the debate, the Romney campaign
wouldn't identify the woman Romney had referred to, saying
only that she was the sister of Romney's brother-in-law, and
that she had been engaged when she became pregnant. The
candidate himself said, "I hadn't thought much about"
abortion until the relative's death, but that it "obviously
makes one see that regardless of one's beliefs about choice,
that you would hope it would be safe and legal."
Through public records in Michigan and
interviews with people who knew her, the basic contours of
Ann Keenan's life can be established. This picture, at
right, is from her 1959 senior yearbook at Detroit's
exclusive
Liggett School
(click for larger size), four years before her death.
Keenan was born in 1941, the daughter
of a Detroit public school English teacher. Her elder
brother Loren married Mitt Romney's elder sister Lynn in the
late 1950s. The family lived on Edison Avenue in the
well-to-do Boston-Edison
neighborhood
in the heart of Detroit, then a booming manufacturing
center. (Indeed, George Romney was president of the American
Motor Corp. before being elected governor of Michigan in
1962.)
"She was so intelligent, beautiful and a
friend to everyone," Marilyn Frey, a classmate and friend of
Keenan in the 22-member class of 1959 at the all-girls
Liggett School, recalled in an email to Salon. In high
school, Keenan was active in theater, performing in "The
Importance of Being Earnest" and serving for three years on
the drama board. She was a scholarship recipient and class
president her sophomore year. One of Romney's sisters was
quoted in the press in 1994 recalling that Keenan "was a
beautiful, talented girl [whom] we all loved."
Keenan went
on to Michigan State University but little is known about
her time there. In 1962, just a year before her death, she
appeared
in the Grosse Pointe News after she and a young man pleaded
guilty to using a fake ID to buy alcohol.
On Oct. 7,
1963, at Wyandotte General Hospital south of Detroit, Keenan
died of an infection following what her death
certificate
describes as a "criminal recent abortion." The cause of
death is listed as:
Subarachnoid hemorrhage following
septic criminal recent abortion with septic
thromboembolism pneumonia and hepatitis with focal
necrosis of liver
Infection, often caused by the use of
unsanitary instruments, was one of the most common causes of
death from abortion in the pre-Roe era, according to Dr.
David Grimes, who previously worked at the Centers for
Disease Control studying abortion deaths.
Two of Keenan's friends, Frey and Sandra
Nye, did not know how she died until Salon contacted them
recently. That may have something to do with the fact that
George Romney, who would go on to run for the Republican
presidential nomination in 1968, had been elected governor
just a year before Keenan's death.
"It was all very hush-hush because Romney
was governor, and they really wanted this very quiet and to
go away," said Nye, who attended Liggett and Michigan State
with Keenan. A rumor circulated that Keenan had committed
suicide, Nye said, and she did not remember a funeral being
held.
What did appear was a
brief death notice in the Detroit News. It says merely that
Keenan died "suddenly," but her parents added that "Memorial
tributes may be sent to the Planned Parenthood Association."
Planned Parenthood was at that time an organization focused
exclusively on birth control and family planning; abortions,
of course, were not yet legal. But the group had sponsored a
conference several years earlier supporting liberalization
of abortion laws.
Mitt Romney was 16
when Keenan died.
We don't know
what Keenan's abortion experience was like. She could, like
many women who ended up injured or dead from abortions in
that era, have tried to self-induce. Douching with soap or
bleach was a "common and frequently fatal method," though
there were many others, according to Leslie Reagan's
book "When
Abortion Was a Crime." Big city hospitals treated thousands
of women each year for often brutal injuries related to
illegal abortions. By the early 1960s, as childbirth became
safer, abortion-related deaths made up nearly half of the
entire maternal mortality rate in New York City, according
to one study.
Alternatively, Keenan may have been able,
through a referral from a doctor or through word-of-mouth
(perhaps from her fiancé or a family member), to find an
abortionist. That abortionist could have been someone with
no medical training, or a licensed doctor willing to quietly
perform the procedure on the side. Keenan might have been
blindfolded and taken alone to an unknown place, a common
precaution at the time. But the quality of service could be
spotty and conditions were often unclean, a major cause of
infections.
Plus, in the face of police crackdowns in
the early '60s, the cost of hiring an abortionist was
quickly increasing. A woman seeking discretion might have
had to travel to another city. And the stakes were extremely
high. For women who were found out, there could be
disciplinary consequences at college. And there was also, of
course, the intense social shaming inflicted on unmarried
women who became pregnant.
A story cited in Reagan's book
demonstrates just how powerful the stigma could be:
One woman, who had gone to a southern
women's college, remembered another student who had an
illegal abortion. "She was too frightened to tell anyone
what she had done," she recalled, "so when she developed
complications, [she] tried to take care of herself. She
locked herself in the bathroom between two dorm rooms
and quietly bled to death."
Some women who suffered complications
delayed going to the hospital out of a very real fear of
interrogation or referral to the police -- with fatal
consequences. (Though it was typically the providers, not
their clients, who were prosecuted.)
Evergreen Cemetery, Detroit
The data is imperfect, but
studies
(pdf) from this era suggest that as many as 5,000 women died
per year from illegal abortions in the United States.
Following the liberalization of abortion laws in several
states in the early 1970s and the Roe decision in 1973, the
death rate dropped drastically. In New York City, for
example, the maternal mortality rate dropped 45 percent the
year after the state legalized abortion, according to
Reagan's book.
This history
is precisely what made Romney's insistence in that 1994
debate that abortion should be "safe and legal" so
compelling. That year, he even attended a Planned Parenthood
fundraiser, and his wife, Ann, gave $150 to the group. And
while he used much more muted language, Romney vowed during
his successful 2002 campaign for governor of Massachusetts
to uphold the state's abortion laws. But in 2005, as he
prepared to seek the 2008 GOP presidential nomination,
Romney switched gears and announced in a Boston Globe
Op-Ed
that he was changing his position, describing himself as
"prolife" and arguing that states should be able to set
their own abortion laws.
At around the same time, Romney's
statements from the '94 debate received new scrutiny. Boston
Globe columnist Eileen McNamara interviewed an associate of
his late mother, Lenore Romney, whom Romney had praised in
'94 for supposedly supporting legal abortion during her own
1970 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. The
associate, who had worked on Lenore Romney's unsuccessful
campaign, had no memory of the candidate coming out in favor
of legal abortion. Lenore Romney's campaign took place seven
years after Ann Keenan's death and three years before Roe.
In response to McNamara's column, Romney's office dug up an
old platform document from his mother's campaign that
offered a muddled-sounding position:
I support and recognize the need for
more liberal abortion rights while reaffirming the legal
and medical measures needed to protect the unborn and
pregnant woman [sic]."
When he changed his abortion stance, Mitt
Romney didn't make reference to Ann Keenan's case or discuss
how her own tragic story meshed with his new stance, which
effectively called for a return to the way things were when
Keenan died. His presidential campaign declined to comment
for this story. (And Keenan's older brother did not respond
to a request for comment.)
As a
political issue, abortion continues to cause headaches for
Romney. In June, he declined to sign a pledge by the
antiabortion group Susan B. Anthony List,
arguing
that it would require signatories to defund thousands of
hospitals that offer abortion services. But Romney
maintained that he would cut funding to Planned Parenthood,
that he opposed Roe, and that "abortion should be limited to
only instances of rape, incest, or to save the life of the
mother."
Justin Elliott is a Salon
reporter. Reach him by email at jelliott@salon.com
and follow him on Twitter
@ElliottJustin
More:
Justin Elliott
WASHINGTON -- Reform groups filed an
official complaint and request for investigation on Friday against
the company that gave a $1 million donation to a pro-Mitt Romney
group then subsequently dissolved.
The
Campaign Legal Center
and
Democracy 21
filed an
official complaint
with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and
sent a letter
to the U.S. Department of Justice. They're calling for a closer look
at the $1 million contribution from the company W Spann LLC to
Restore Our Future PAC, a Super PAC created by former Romney
staffers to support the former Massachusetts governor's bid for the
presidency.
"This case deserves a good hard
look from the agencies charged with enforcing our nation’s election
laws and if violations are found they must be prosecuted vigorously
to deter such violations in the future -- otherwise 'straw
companies' will make a mockery of campaign finance disclosure and
the specter of foreign campaign contributions will hang over the
process," Paul S. Ryan, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center,
said in a statement issued Friday.
Democracy 21 President Fred
Wertheimer said, "In this case, it appears that someone has gone to
great lengths to evade the campaign finance disclosure laws in order
to hide what they are doing from the American people. This is
unacceptable and potentially illegal conduct and we are calling for
an investigation of possible campaign finance violations by the
Federal Election Commission and Justice Department."
The calls for an
investigation come one day after
NBC reported
that W Spann had dissolved in July, only four months after forming
and three months after making the contribution.
The FEC complaint alleges that W
Spann broke the law by making a contribution in the name of another
person and failing to form and register as a political committee.
The letter to the Justice Department asks that, if the FEC fails to
act, the Department step in to enforce the law.
Speculation around the
source of the W Spann contribution is ongoing. The
Boston Phoenix's
David Bernstein writes that the
contribution may have come from the hedge fund billionaire Paul
Singer, whose Elliott Management has an office at the address W
Spann listed on its contribution.
Bernstein speculates that Singer
may have wished to give to the pro-Romney group anonymously because
he was also "reported to be the main funder behind New Yorkers
United for Marriage, a coalition formed earlier this year to
advocate for legalizing same-sex marriage in that state."
Although Romney has received
tepid support from social conservatives in the past, on Friday he
signed a pledge
to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as "the union
of one man and one woman" if he were elected president.
As
Mitt Romney’s atrocious record on job creation continues to from
other Republicans,
Democrats are starting to focus more of their energies on the Republican
frontrunner’s more glaring vulnerability.
Today, for example, the former governor will campaign at a NASCAR race
in Loudon, New Hampshire. The Democratic National Committee released a
new video to honor the occasion.
In
case there are any doubts, this has the benefit of being true. During
Romney’s only service in public office, his state’s record on job
creation was “one
of the worst in the country.”
Massachusetts ranked47th
out of 50 states in jobs
growth on Romney’s watch (and unlike President Obama, Romney didn’t
inherit an economic crisis). There was a reason Romney served one term
and then quit — he was not all popular with his constituents and
probably would have lost a re-election bid.
On
the campaign trail, Romney keeps making this worse. He not only seems to
find unemployment funny, he’s also arguing that jobless Americans have
to bear a greater burden because corporations need another tax cut.
Despite all of this, Romney has decided to not only build his entire
campaign around the jobs issue, but also position himself as a champion
of the unemployed. This morning’s DNC video is a hint of what’s to come
— labeling Romney as “the anti-jobs candidate” will be a pretty
straightforward exercise.
As a
purely political matter, unemployment is obviously a key obstacle for
the president’s re-election. Is Obama lucky enough to have Republicans
nominate the candidate whose weakest
issue is jobs?
Mitt Romney is
Damned. That much is clear. But where and how ? Dante neglected to
specify which circle of hell a soul is consigned to after betraying the
citizens of Massachusetts for the sake of Greed and politics.
Traitors are of course consigned to the innermost circles, ranging from traitors to their
kin, lords, country and benefactors. No space appears to have been left for traitors
to citizens of States.
The thought struck us that hell is long overdue for a make-over. The business of sin
has changed substantially since Dante's day. Not only are many of the sins archaic
(it seems doubtful at this point that Protestants are damned as schismatics) but as in the
McConnell case, Dante has failed to keep up with the times. What is the punishment
for TV evangelists Political Liars, Political Theives, or for that matter for those take
advantage of Citizens.
Whatever Romney's position, anyone who
betrays Citizens in that calculating manner deserves the fate that Dante would
assign him: being trapped in ice up to the neck in the deepest pit of the Inferno,
where treachery against basic human bonds is punished and where Satan himself, once the
brightest of the rebel angels, beats his bat's wings.
Good Luck Mitt, Satan is coming for you
anytime now - he remembers when you sold your soul and he's coming to collect!!!
We will leave it up to the reader to determine whether
Mitt Romney has made serious errors in judgment. Mitt has sort-of supported a
Conservative Christian position especially when it involves running for office. But
you can't tell because he has flip flopped so many times that he can say he has supported
anything and been against anything. It is apparent from the data collected, that
truth and the first amendment may be in danger from his past actions.
When we called Mitt Romney's office last year, they stated that his
position is that there is no such thing as any religion but his version of
Mormonism/Christianity, that all other religions weren't "Real"
religions." What is a real religion, Mr. Romney?
What are you practicing? Whatever it is should be
made illegal. Read the following and remember: "By their Works may they be
known." This is a summary of information collected from several sources
including Washington Post, Salon Magazine, Harpers Magazine, Atlanta Journal Constitution
and others about Mitt Romney.
(Remember it is best to investigate on your own when
looking at allegations about anyone. Don't believe us, think for
yourself and investigate for yourself! And remember, the Religious Freedom Coalition
does not represent any political party nor do we recommend any political candidate, nor
are we involving ourselves in the political process.
Willard was
born March 12, 1947.
He is a businessman, a
former Republican governor of Massachusetts, a former 2008 Republican
Presidential candidate, and a hypocrite.
Mitt Romney’s impressive political acumen was instilled in him from
his birth on March 12, 1947, to a failed presidential candidate
(George) and a failed Senate candidate (Lenore). Born Williard Mitt
Romney, he was named after his father’s best friend, hotel magnate J.
Willard Marriott, founder of a chain of hotels that, like Romney
himself, are nice-looking but generally bland and indistinctive.
Romney is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day
Saints, otherwise known as Mormons, otherwise known as “those guys that
HBO show with the polygamists is about.” When the U.S. Supreme Court
upheld various anti-polygamy statues in the late 1800s, Romney’s
great-grandparents fled to Mexico so the men could bang multiple wives
they could practice their religion. The family returned to the United
States after Mitt’s father was born. In summation: Mitt Romney’s
ancestors were sex addicts, and his father was a Mexican immigrant.
Mitt has been married for 38 years to Ann Romney, who is a
convert to her husband’s religion. They have five sons, one of whom is
named “Tagg.” According to Mitt, the sons, who are all eligible to
fight in Iraq, are serving their country by "helping me get elected.”
The Army’s loss is the Internet’s gain, because the brothers host a
blog, creatively called Five Brothers, which features such America-serving stories as, “Soup Recipes Submitted To AnnRomney.com,” and “An Easy Halloween Costume.” Five Brothers is a political must-read, right after the Daily Kos. Also, once again, one of Romney’s sons is named “Tagg.”
From 1974 to 1998, Romney eschewed politics for the traditional
Republican
pursuit of accumulating vast piles of money. During that time, he
co-founded Boston’s Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm
which yielded a dickishly high, yet no less impressive 113% rate of
return during his 14 year tenure. Romney left Bain Capital in 1998 to
head the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Games Organizing Committee.
Romney’s Games made $100 million in profit, which is really what the
Greeks had in mind all along.
In 1994, he ran for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, losing after Kennedy
infamously called the (then) pro-choice Romney “multiple choice,” a
stinging rebuke for which Romney was only able to think of the perfect
comeback hours later, while lying in bed, which is totally frustrating.
On the heels of his Olympic success, Romney was elected governor of
Massachusetts in 2002. He began his term as a proponent of domestic
partnerships for same-sex couples, and ended it urging the U.S. Senate
to pass a constitutional ban on gay marriage. Untroubled by low
approval ratings (70% of Massachusetts residents rated him “fair to
poor”), Romney decided to run for president at the conclusion of his
term in January 2007.
On February 7, 2008, Romney suspended his presidential
campaign, describing his moral obligation to make sure the Democrats
lose as badly as possible. At a speech to the Conservative Political
Action Conference, Romney spoke at length about his devotion to
ensuring the success of the Iraq war and protecting American lives. In
solidarity, voters overwhelmingly agreed with him that the the best
thing for America was for him to not be President.
Interestingly, after his brief consideration for the 2008 Vice
Presidential candidacy, Romney has somehow positioned himself as the
moderate, sensible candidate in the GOP's early 2012 presidential
consideration, considering his likely opponents.
Romney is currently against the conservative trifecta of abortion,
gay marriage and stem cell research, despite the fact that the latter
may hold a cure for his wife Ann’s multiple sclerosis. He supports the
Iraq war, the death penalty and withholding constitutional rights from
suspected terrorists. All positions, of course, are subject to change.
Poor Mitt Romney. He’s been accused
of a lot of flip flops in his campaign. He was for
government mandated health care, then against it, being
pro-choice or anti-abortion depending on what office
he’s running for.
Now his biggest
talking point in his presidential campaign — claiming
that President Barack Obama has made the economy worse —
is turning into another about face. With the media
pointing out that the claim doesn’t statistically hold
true, Romney is now trying to say he never said it in
the first place.
When NBC producer Sue
Kroll asked the former Massachusetts governor why he
believes that Obama’s policies have made the economy
worse — when the economy is now growing (and not
shrinking like it was in 2009), when the Dow is climbing
(and no longer in a free-fall like it was in ’09), and
when the unemployment rate is down a full percentage
point from where it was in Oct. ’09 — Romney gave this
answer:
I didn’t say
that things are worse.
Romney went on to say:
What I said was
that economy hasn’t turned around, that you’ve got
20 million Americans out of work, or seriously
unemployed; housing values still going down. You
have a crisis of foreclosures in this country. The
economy, by the way, if you think the economy is
great and going well, be my guest. But the president
of the United States, when he put in place his
stimulus plan and borrowed $787 billion, said he
would hold unemployment below 8% — and 8% seemed
like an awfully high number. It hasn’t been below 8%
since. That’s failure. We’re over 9% unemployment.
That’s failure. He set the bogie himself at 8%
,which strikes me as a very high number and we’re
still above that three years later.
But of course,
Romney did say it. A lot. So everyone should have seen
this video coming.
The GOP
frontrunner officially launches his 2012
presidential bid—with a fact-free claim
about the looming extinction of America's
free market economy.
Excerpt from an article on
motherjones.com by
David Corn
June 2, 2011
At 1:00
in the afternoon, Romney delivered his
announcement speech at a New Hampshire farm, and
said the line
highlighted below.
It's Mitt
Romney's big day. In New Hampshire, he will
officially announce his second presidential
run—which unofficially began the moment John
McCain lost to Barack Obama. And he's launching
his campaign with a whopper.
According
to the advance text of his speech—which his
aides handed out to various media outfits to
boost interest in Romney's unsurprising
declaration—Romney will proclaim that President
Obama has "failed America." He will blast Obama
for expanding the size and reach of government.
He will somberly state,
"We are only
inches away from ceasing to be a free market
economy."
Inches away? Is he
kidding? Did Sarah Palin write this line for
Romney?
Reporters should ask the former
mandate-embracing governor of Massachusetts to
back up this demagogic statement. Where is the
free market grinding to a halt? Romney might be
tempted to repeat the right-wing shibboleth that
Obama's health care overhaul is a "government
takeover"—a
sentiment Romney expressed recently
when he gave a speech explaining (or defending
or excusing) the health care reform he enacted
in the Bay State. But Politifact.com rated this
assertion 2010's
"Lie of the Year,"
noting that the Obama plan relies on private
insurance companies, and it
awarded Romney
its "pants on fire" rating for recycling the
"takeover" line last month.
So
what other evidence might Romney submit to back
up his claim that the free market economy is on
the brink of destruction? American automakers
are in a much better (and more competitive)
position, due to Obama's rescue plan. (Romney
opposed the use of federal money
to save Detroit.)
Corporate and bank profits have been soaring in
recent months. And the stock mark recovered from
the losses brought about by the Bush-Cheney
crash of 2008. If this is
the end of our free market economy, titans of
industry and investors may be tempted to embrace
its demise.
The
economic news for the rest of the nation,
though, has indeed been not bright. The lead
story of this morning's Washington Post
reports,
"The economic recovery is faltering, and
Washington is running out of ways to get it back
on track." Manufacturing and private-sector job
creation have both slowed, while home prices are
declining and consumer spending has slackened.
All this, combined with the downgrade of
Greece's debt rating by Moody's, sent stocks
tumbling on Wednesday.
So
Romney, the apparent GOP frontrunner, has plenty
of cause to talk about the economy and to
critique current policies. As a former business
executive and past governor, he can boast
experience concerning economic activity and
government policy-making. In fact, of all the
GOP candidates in the field, Romney has the most
standing to challenge Obama's economic actions
(even if the company he led often brokered deals
that
resulted in job losses).
With his
announcement speech, though, Romney is signaling
that he's not prepared to have an adult
conversation that transcends the scoring of
political points. Romney's paramount
responsibility as a presidential wannabe is to
play to (or pander to) Republican primary
voters. In the past, he has demonstrated how far
he's willing to go in that regard by trading in
his moderate/liberal positions on abortion, gay
rights, and gun control for the traditional GOP
stances on these matters. Issuing over-the-top
assertions about the economy is not a stretch
for him.
Yet these
challenging times deserve serious
discourse—especially on economic matters. The
Republicans are pushing the notion that
drastically reducing government spending is the
cure for what ails the economy. Conventional
economists disagree. With overall demand
lagging, they say, now's not the time to
downsize government-driven demand. That is, not
if you care about boosting (or maintaining)
economic activity and creating (or saving) jobs.
How this debate turns out will affect the
fortunes of millions of working Americans—and of
the nation itself.
Romney can
play an important role in this debate. If
there's a fact-based and reasonable case to be
made for the Republican position, he's the
ex-CEO for the job. But such a conversation
needs to be free of demagoguery—or, at least,
free of excessive demagoguery. But when his
audience is red-meat-hungry Republican primary
voters and caucus attendees, Romney is not going
to trim the excess.
The
nation's free market economy is not on the verge
of extinction. (Oh, look, here come the
collectivists!) Romney must know that. Yet
his willingness to utter such an extreme,
fear-laden remark shows he's eager to tap the
paranoid, Obama-is-destroying-America sentiment
rife within Republican ranks. You might even say
that Romney has drunk the Tea
Party tea.
David Corn is
Mother
Jones' Washington bureau chief. For
more of his stories,
click here.
Mitt Romney is attempting to
establish himself as the Republican presidential candidate with
the most credibility on job creation, but the former
Massachusetts governor may have trouble defending his record.
During Romney's tenure as governor, Massachusetts' job growth
was bested by every state in the nation except three, including
Hurricane Katrina-devastated Louisiana. As CEO of Bain Capital,
Romney profited as five of the companies under his firm's
direction went bankrupt, and thousands of workers lost their
jobs. One particularly brutal round of firings came back to
haunt Romney during his failed 1994 Senate campaign, when
laid-off workers protested his candidacy.
As Governor, Romney
Oversaw Dismal Job Growth In Massachusetts
Huffington
Post: As Governor, "Romney Presided
Over One Of The Puniest Rates Of Growth Among The 50 U.S.
States."
According to the Huffington Post:
"[A]s Massachusetts governor from January 2003 to January 2007,
Romney presided over one of the puniest rates of employment
growth among the 50 U.S. states, at a time the nation's economy
was booming." [Huffington Post,
5/31/11]
After First Year
With Romney As Governor, Massachusetts Ranked "Dead Last" In
Jobs Growth.
According to MarketWatch: "How was Romney's performance by his
first anniversary? Fiftieth out of fifty. That's right. In
Romney's first year in charge, Massachusetts ranked dead last in
America in jobs growth." [MarketWatch,
2/23/11]
By The End Of
Romney's Term, Massachusetts Still Ranked "Fourth From Last" In
Jobs Growth. According to
MarketWatch:
The Republican
contender was the governor of Massachusetts from January
2003 to January 2007. And during that time, according to the
U.S. Labor Department, the
state ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth.
Fourth from last.
The only ones that did
worse? Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana. In other words, two
rustbelt states and another that lost its biggest city to a
hurricane.
The Massachusetts jobs
growth over that period, a pitiful 0.9%, badly lagged other
high-skill, high-wage, knowledge economy states like New
York (2.7%), California (4.7%) and North Carolina (7.6%).
The national
average: More than 5%. [MarketWatch,
2/23/11,
emphasis added]
"On All Key
Labor Market Measures," Massachusetts "Lagged Behind The
Country."
According to a Boston Globe op-ed by economic
researchers at Northeastern University's Center for Market
Studies: "On all key labor market measures, the state not only
lagged behind the country as a whole, but often ranked at or
near the bottom of the state distribution. Formal payroll
employment in the state in 2006 was still 16,000 or 0.5 percent
below its average level in 2002, the year immediately prior to
the start of the Romney administration. Massachusetts ranked
third lowest on this key job generation measure and would have
ranked second lowest if Hurricane Katrina had not devastated the
Louisiana economy. Manufacturing payroll employment throughout
the nation declined by nearly 1.1 million or 7 percent between
2002 and 2006, but in Massachusetts it declined by more than 14
percent, the third worst record in the country." [Center for
Market Studies op-ed, Boston Globe, 7/29/07]
Romney Approved
Raises For State Government Management That Increased Risk Of
Worker Layoffs.
According to the Boston Globe:
"Governor Mitt Romney has quietly approved a pay increase for
2,700 managers across state government, a move that may trigger
more layoffs of lower-level workers as the state copes with its
bleakest budget in more than a decade. In a confidential memo
obtained by the Globe, Romney's human resources chief, Ruth N.
Bramson, wrote that the governor granted a 2 percent
across-the-board pay raise to managers in part because
rank-and-file workers are gaining ground on their bosses through
union-negotiated raises. The pay increase for managers, which is
retroactive to the beginning of this month, is coming on top of
2.7 percent cost-of-living increases that managers received July
1. About 2,700 managers across the state's executive branch are
receiving the additional pay raise, with the cost estimated to
approach $3.5 million." [Boston Globe,
7/31/03]
As CEO, Romney
Profited While Thousands Of Workers Were Laid Off And Five Of
His Companies Went Bankrupt
Romney Was CEO
Of Bain Capital. From the
Boston Globe:
Throughout his 15-year
career at Bain Capital, which bought, sold, and merged
dozens of companies, Romney had other chances to fight to
save jobs, but didn't. His ultimate responsibility was to
make money for Bain's investors, former partners said.
Much as he did
when running for Massachusetts governor, Romney is now
touting his business credentials as he campaigns for
president, asserting that he helped create thousands of jobs
as CEO of Bain. [Boston Globe,
1/27/08]
Companies
Acquired By Romney's Firm Cut Thousands Of Jobs, And Several
Ended Up In Bankruptcy.
According to Politico:
In 1992, the firm
acquired American Pad & Paper. By 1999, the year Romney
left Bain, two American plants were closed, 385 jobs had
been cut and the company was $392 million in debt.
The next year, Ampad
was forced into bankruptcy.
Bain Capital and
Goldman Sachs bought Dade International for about $450
million in 1994.
The firm quickly fired
or relocated at least 900 workers. Over the next several
years, it sunk increasingly into debt and laid off 1,000
workers.
In 2002 - after Romney
had left Bain - it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection.
A 1997 buyout
ofLIVE Entertainment for $150 million resulted in 40
layoffs, roughly one in four of the company's 166
workers.
The job cuts affected
all aspects of the company, from production and acquisition
to legal and public relations.
In 1997, Bain
bought a stake in DDI Corp., a maker of electronic
circuit boards.
Three years later, Bain
took the company public and collected a $36 million payout.
But by August 2003, the
company filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off more
than 2,100 workers.
Four months after
the bankruptcy, unhappy shareholders sued company
executives, the initial public offering underwriters and
Bain for mismanaging the IPO and failing to disclose company
financial information. (Romney was not named in the suit.) [Politico,
1/18/08]
Romney "Made
Fortunes By Bankrupting Five Profitable Businesses."
According to the New York Post:
Romney said:
He was not involved in
decisions to take distributions from two Bain Capital
businesses that later failed. New York Times, June 3, 2007
"People in America want
to know who can get 15 million people back to work."
Romney did:
Owned a controlling
interest in Bain Capital when it took payments from five
companies that later failed.
Made fortunes by
bankrupting five profitable businesses that ended up firing
thousands of workers. [New York Post,
2/20/11,
emphasis original]
Five
Businesses Under Bain Made Huge Profits But Eventually Went
Bankrupt.
According to Think Progress: "22 percent of the
money Bain Capital raised from 1987 to 1995 was invested in
five businesses - Stage Stores, American Pad & Paper, GS
Indusries, Dade, and Details. These five made Bain $578
million in profit, even as all five eventually went
bankrupt." [Think Progress,
4/12/11]
Former Romney
Colleague: "They're Whitewashing His Career Now. ... We Had A
Scheme Where The Rich Got Richer."
According to the Los Angeles Times:
During Romney's tenure
at Bain Capital, outside experts say, most of the companies
he and his colleagues helped manage ended up stronger and
more profitable. Although exact figures are impossible to
obtain, more companies clearly added jobs than cut them.
Some of Romney's
colleagues recall him as vain, however, and focused only on
the bottom line. They saw him as impatient and unconcerned
about those affected by his decisions.
"They're
whitewashing his career now," said Marc B. Wolpow, a former
managing director at Bain Capital who opposes Romney's White
House bid. "We had a scheme where the rich got richer. I did
it, and I feel good about it. But I'm not planning to run
for office." [Los Angeles Times,
12/16/07]
Boston Globe:
Romney Had "Chances To Fight To Save Jobs, But Didn't."
According to the Boston Globe: "Romney's decision to
stay on the sidelines as his firm, Bain Capital, slashed jobs at
the office supply manufacturer stands in marked contrast to his
recent pledges to beleaguered auto workers in Michigan and
textile workers in South Carolina to 'fight to save every
job.' Throughout his 15-year career at Bain Capital, which
bought, sold, and merged dozens of companies, Romney had other
chances to fight to save jobs, but didn't. His ultimate
responsibility was to make money for Bain's investors, former
partners said." [Boston Globe,
1/27/08]
Boston Globe:
"Romney's Tenure [At Bain] Indicates That Job Growth Was Not A
Particular Priority."
According to the Boston Globe:
Much as he did when
running for Massachusetts governor, Romney is now touting
his business credentials as he campaigns for president,
asserting that he helped create thousands of jobs as CEO of
Bain. But a review of Bain's investments during Romney's
tenure indicates that job growth was not a particular
priority. [...]
In many cases, such as
Staples Inc., the Framingham retailer, and Steel Dynamics
Inc., an Indiana steelmaker, the companies expanded and
added thousands of jobs. In other cases, such as Ampad and
GS Industries, another steelmaker, Bain-controlled companies
shuttered plants, slashed hundreds of jobs, and landed in
bankruptcy.
But in almost all
cases Bain Capital made money. In fact, the firm earned
substantially more from Ampad than Staples. Staples returned
about $13 million on a $2 million investment; Ampad yielded
more than $100 million on $5 million, according to reports
to investors. [Boston Globe,
1/27/08]
Laid-Off Factory
Workers Helped Bring Down Romney's 1994 Senate Campaign
Under Bain
Management, Ampad Workers Were Fired, Benefits And Salaries Were
Slashed, And Strikebreakers Were Hired.
According to the Los Angeles Times:
Bain Capital had bought
a controlling interest in a paper products company called
Ampad for $5 million in 1992. Two years later, after Ampad
bought a factory in Marion, Ind., the new management team
dismissed about 200 workers, slashed salaries and benefits,
and hired strikebreakers after the union called a walkout.
"We were just
fired," Randy Johnson, a former worker and union officer at
the Marion plant, recalled in a telephone interview. "They
came in and said, 'You're all fired. If you want to work for
us, here's an application.' We had insurance until the end
of the week. That was it. It was brutal." [Los Angeles
Times,
12/16/07]
Former Ampad
Employees Protested Romney's Unsuccessful 1994 Senate Campaign.
According to the Los
Angeles Times:
In October 1994,
[former Ampad worker Randy] Johnson and other striking
workers drove to Massachusetts to protest Romney's Senate
campaign. "We chased him everywhere," Johnson recalled. "He
took good jobs with benefits, and created low-wage,
part-time, no-benefit jobs. That's what he was creating with
his investments."
At first, Romney
tried to justify the Indiana layoffs as necessary in "the
real world." He then sought to distance himself, arguing
that he took a leave of absence from Bain Capital before
Ampad bought the factory. The dispute proved potent,
however, and Kennedy trounced him in the election. [Los
Angeles Times,
12/16/07]
Ads Showing
Unhappy Former Ampad Employees Were "The Back-Breaker" In
Unsuccessful 1994 Senate Campaign.
According to the Huffington Post:
The back-breaker for
Romney was a series of television ads produced by Bob Shrum
(author of the book, due out shortly, No Excuses:
Concessions of a Serial Campaigner). Charlie Baker, the
Kennedy campaign's senior strategist that year, told The
Huffington Post that the ads were designed "to get on the
record all sides of Romney's business career" -- a hugely
successful leveraged-buyout practice that Romney claimed had
created jobs.
The Kennedy
campaign discovered that Ampad, a company purchased by
Romney's Bain Capital in 1992, had recently bought SCM, an
office products company in Marion, Indiana. All 350 workers
at the SCM plant were laid off, then offered their jobs back
at reduced wages. They went on strike. The Kennedy campaign
sent a crew to Marion to film the workers. A half dozen ads
resulted from the interviews, most of them quoting workers
denouncing Romney for lining his pockets at their expense. A
women [sic] tells viewers: "I'd like to say to the
people of Massachusetts, if you think it can't happen to
you, think again, because we thought it couldn't happen here
either." Romney nosedived in the polls. [Huffington Post,
5/30/07]
Romney On Ampad
Layoffs: "Sometimes The Medicine Is A Little Bitter."
According to the New York Times:
But leveraged buyouts
often lead to layoffs, a business reality that has impinged
on Mr. Romney's political hopes at least once before. In his
1994 campaign for the Senate, Mr. Romney's efforts to unseat
Edward M. Kennedy were derailed in part because of
accusations that Bain Capital had fired union workers at an
Indiana company it controlled. Mr. Kennedy's campaign cut a
series of commercials, focusing on laid-off workers, that
cut to the quick. (Those ads are available on The Huffington
Post.) Mr. Romney has said that he had nothing to do with
the firings.
In an interview with
The Times, Mr. Romney acknowledged that Bain Capital's
acquisitions has sometimes led to layoffs, but that he could
explain them to voters.
"Sometimes the
medicine is a little bitter but it is necessary to save the
life of the patient," he said. "My job was to try and make
the enterprise successful, and in my view the best security
a family can have is that the business they work for is
strong." [New York Times,
6/4/07]
On Fox News Sunday,
NPR's Mara Liasson claimed job creation is Mitt Romney's
"brand," adding that "this is his issue ... and I think
that that really helps him." But as governor of
Massachusetts, "Romney presided over one of the puniest
rates of employment growth among the 50 U.S. states, at
a time the nation's economy was booming," according to
Reuters.
Liasson
On Romney: "Job creation is his brand."
From the June 5 edition of Fox News Sunday:
LIASSON: This
was a pretty good week for Mitt Romney to announce.
Job creation is his brand. He's the turnaround
artist. He can say that he's created jobs. Democrats
will point out he also shed some when he took over
these companies, but this is his --
JOHN PODESTA
(Center for American Program CEO and president):
Shipped them overseas.
LIASSON: Yeah,
shipped them overseas. This is his issue and that's
what this election is becoming about with a
vengeance and I think that that really helps him.
[Fox Broadcasting Co., Fox News Sunday,
6/5/11]
Reuters:
"Romney Presided Over One Of The Puniest Rates Of
Employment Growth ... At A Time When The Nation's
Economy Was Booming." From an April 12
Reuters report:
Romney stressed
his experience as head of private equity firm Bain
Capital when he announced on Monday he was forming
an exploratory committee on seeking the Republican
2012 nomination to challenge Obama, a Democrat.
He made a
fortune wheeling and dealing in companies, some of
which endured big job cuts as part of restructuring.
Some ultimately went bankrupt.
[...]
[A]s
Massachusetts governor from January 2003 to January
2007, Romney presided over one of the puniest rates
of employment growth among the 50 U.S. states, at a
time the nation's economy was booming.
Labor
Department figures showed Massachusetts ranked 47th
among the states in the rate of jobs growth in those
four years -- ahead of only Ohio, Michigan and
Louisiana. [Reuters,
4/12/11]
WSJ's
Brett Arends: Mass. Job Growth "Badly Lagged Other
High-Skill, High-Wage, Knowledge Economy States."
According to a February 2010 MarketWatch article by
Wall Street Journal columnist Brett Arends:
Romney, who may
well be President Barack Obama's opponent in 2012,
he had great time last week blaming the president
for the current jobs shortage.
Speaking to the
CPAC right-wing conference in Washington, D.C.,
Romney said that the dismal employment situation, a
year after Obama took office, showed the president
was a "failure" who was "going downhill faster
than... Lindsey Vonn."
OK, let's take
him at his word. Then what does that say about
Romney?
The Republican
contender was the governor of Massachusetts from
January 2003 to January 2007. And during that time,
according to the U.S. Labor Department, the state
ranked 47th in the entire country in jobs growth.
Fourth from last.
The only ones
that did worse? Ohio, Michigan and Louisiana. In
other words, two rustbelt states and another that
lost its biggest city to a hurricane.
The
Massachusetts jobs growth over that period, a
pitiful 0.9%, badly lagged other high-skill,
high-wage, knowledge economy states like New York
(2.7%), California (4.7%) and North Carolina (7.6%).
The national
average: More than 5%.
This was after
four years. So far Obama has been in office for just
one year. How was Romney's performance by his first
anniversary?
Fiftieth out of
fifty.
That's right.
In Romney's first year in charge, Massachusetts
ranked dead last in America in jobs growth. [MarketWatch,
2/23/11]
FactCheck.org:
"Romney's job record provides little to boast about."
In January 2008, FactCheck.org examined
Romney's claim that Massachusetts gained jobs "every
single month" when he was governor and concluded:
Payroll jobs in
Massachusetts hit their low point in December 2003
at the end of Romney's first year in office. And the
number of jobs declined in seven of the remaining 36
months of his term, as measured by total nonfarm
employment, seasonally adjusted, which is the
standard measure of payroll employment used by
economists and journalists. The claim that jobs
increased "every single month" is false.
Furthermore,
Romney's job record provides little to boast about.
By the end of his four years in office,
Massachusetts had squeezed out a net gain in payroll
jobs of just 1 percent, compared with job growth of
5.3 percent for the nation as a whole. [FactCheck.org,
1/11/08]
Economist
Andrew Sum: Wages Also "Stagnated During Romney's Term."
From a June 2008 Reuters report:
The former
Massachusetts governor issued a statement on Sunday
titled "creating jobs" that focuses on 57,600 jobs
added to the Massachusetts economy during his single
term as governor from 2003 to 2007.
But
Northeastern University economist Andrew Sum, who
has researched Romney's record, said the state
lagged the U.S. average during that period in job
creation, economic growth and wage increases.
"As a strict
labor market economist looking at the record,
Massachusetts did very poorly during the Romney
years, he said. "On every measure you've got, the
state was a substantial under-performer."
[...]
His supporters
contend the state's job market was soft long before
Romney's term, which ended in January last year,
blaming a Democratic-controlled Legislature for the
weakness. His spokesman, Kevin Madden, has asserted
that Romney brought Massachusetts "back from the
brink of financial disaster."
But
Northeastern's Sum said that while jobs were created
under Romney, the rate was the third-lowest in the
nation after Hurricane Katrina-hit Louisiana and
Michigan. At the same time, wages in the New England
state stagnated during Romney's term.
The average
weekly wage of Massachusetts workers, Sum said, rose
by just a $1 between 2001 and 2006 after adjusting
for inflation, while the state had the third-highest
rate of population loss in the nation between July
2002 and July 2006.
Real output of
goods and services -- a broad measure of economic
performance -- grew 9 percent, below the 13 percent
rate for the United States, he added. [Reuters,
1/20/08]
Excerpts
from an article posted on huffingtonpost.com
04/30/11
Mitt Romney's
staff is trying to
do damage control after the presidential aspirant
made
controversial
remarks in
criticizing President Barack Obama during a stop in New Hampshire on
Friday night.
Speaking at a dinner hosted by
Americans for Prosperity, the former Massachusetts governor said,
"Reagan came up with this great thing about the ‘misery index’ and he
hung that around Jimmy Carter’s neck and that had a lot to do with Jimmy
Carter losing." He added, "Well, we’re going to have to hang the ‘Obama
Misery Index’ around his neck."
Romney went on to say, "I'll tell
you, the fact that you've got people in this country really squeezed,
with gasoline getting so expensive, with commodities getting so
expensive, families are having a hard time making ends meet. So, we're
going to have to talk about that, and housing foreclosures and
bankruptcies and higher taxation. We're going to hang him, so to speak,
metaphorically."
Romney almost immediately caught
himself, with the English major declaring "metaphorically" speaking,
but the mix of nervous laughter with applause indicated at least
some in the audience realized its potency.
On the heels of the potential
presidential candidate raising eyebrows with the remarks, Romney
spokeswoman Andrea Saul addressed the questionable choice of words. She
told ABC News,
"It is not what the governor meant and that was very clear in what he
actually said."
According to CNN,
Romney's camp called initial reports on his remarks "a ridiculous
exaggeration of his actual comments."
Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee, and other top
Republican presidential contenders denounce Democrats as immoral tax
hikers—but they oversaw dozens of tax hikes as governors facing
deficits, writes Andrew Romano.
The GOP's most promising 2012
presidential contenders—Mitt
Romney,
Tim Pawlenty,
Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels,
and
Mike Huckabee—have
a lot in common. They are all white. They are all middle-aged. They were
all governors at one point. And despite a shared tendency to denounce
Democrats as inveterate, immoral tax hikers, they all have the exact
same skeleton in their closet: a rather inconvenient history of raising
taxes themselves.
Surprised? It's no wonder. Until
now, Romney & Co. have done a good job of hiding their tax-raising
records from the rest of the Republican Party—with good reason. In a
perfect world, according to GOP orthodoxy, taxes would always be lower
than they are right now, no matter how low they currently happen to be.
In 2009, for example, U.S. taxes shrank to their smallest share of
personal income since 1950. Conservatives still complained. And in the
unlikely instance that taxes cannot possibly be reduced any
further—like, say, when revenue plummets to a record-low 14.9 percent of
GDP, which is where they are today—right-thinking Republicans are
required to do the next best thing: Refuse, at all costs, to raise them.
The 2012 budget blueprint
that Wisconsin Rep.
Paul Ryan
unveiled this month is only the latest example of the GOP's taxophobia.
Ryan claims the purpose of the proposal is to eradicate the national
debt. But his "Path to Prosperity" puts America an extra $4 trillion in
the hole before it even attempts to accomplish this worthy goal. How? By
slashing taxes for the wealthiest Americans—forever. As a result, the
rest of Ryan's cuts—to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the FBI,
highways, environmental protection, the Coast Guard, and so on—are
trillions of dollars larger than they'd otherwise have to be. The
message is clear, if contradictory: For Republicans, the only thing more
important than reducing the deficit is increasing it—via massive tax
cuts.
Which is why it's so curious
that all the party's would-be standard-bearers did precisely the
opposite when they were actually tasked with balancing a budget. Some,
like Daniels, raised taxes in a relatively straightforward manner. When
the former Office of Management and Budget director took control of
Indiana in 2005, the state was $200 million in the hole. Digging out was
his first priority—and
one of his first proposals was a sizable tax hike
on all individuals and entities earning over $100,000. The legislature
blocked the plan, but Daniels eventually passed a handful of new taxes:
one on liquor, one on rental cars, and one that increased the state
sales tax from 6 percent to 7 percent. Indiana soon had a $1.3 billion
surplus.
For Republicans,
the only thing more important than reducing the deficit is increasing
it—via massive tax cuts.
AP Photo
When it comes to fiscal
discipline, Daniels doesn't think tax hikes should be the first option,
or even the second or third. But he does believe that they should always
be an option. When I asked the governor last summer how he'd tackle the
national debt as president, for example, he
admitted that "at
some stage there could well be a tax increase." A few months later, he
confessed that he
would consider both a European-style value added tax (VAT) and a tariff
on imported oil as potential sources of government revenue. "They say we
can't have grownup conversations anymore," he told me. "I think we can."
Daniels' openness is
admirable. But he's pretty much the only Republican contender who's
willing to own up to the fact that he raised taxes. During Mike
Huckabee's time as governor of Arkansas, for instance, he transformed a
$200 million budget shortfall into an $844 million surplus. One of the
ways he accomplished that nifty feat was with
targeted tax hikes:
a 3 percent income-tax surcharge on individuals and corporations; three
separate hikes on the state sales tax; several new tax increases on
cigarettes, tobacco, and related permits; a 3 percent tax on beer; a 4
percent tax on mixed drinks; a 3- to 4-cent tax per gallon of gas; and a
$6 increase to the driver's-license fee.
But when Huckabee ran for
president in 2008, he insisted that he had cut taxes more than he raised
them; he suggested that the legislature or the state Supreme Court had
forced his hand; and he swore that he hadn't actually signed some of the
tax increases he was accused of signing. In truth, Huckabee's tax
increases
outweighed his tax cuts by nearly $500 million.
He once begged the legislature for every imaginable kind of tax hike—without
any coercion. And he did, in fact,
affix his Hancock
to the tax increases in question. Huck had good reason to squirm, in
other words—at least during primary season
Romney was just as slippery. On
the surface, the former Massachusetts governor's fiscal record looks a lot
like Huckabee's: He inherited a $650 million shortfall (with a $3 billion
projected deficit), then turned it into a $600 to $700 million surplus by
the time he left office. To do so, Romney also made a concerted effort to
increase tax revenue, in part by
raising fees by a grand total of $432 million
on marriage licenses, driver's license renewals, gun permits,
community-college tuitions, deed registrations, Children's Medical Security
Program co-pays and premiums, probation services, deliveries of petroleum
products, bottle deposits, mortgage-broker licenses, and civil-service
exams, and in part by closing $309 million in corporate tax loopholes. (He
also raised the sales tax on used cars.)
The big difference between Romney
and Huckabee is that Huckabee tried to rewrite his tax history. Romney
didn't. He simply
claimed, in vintage
Mitt Romney fashion, that none of his revenue-increasing proposals actually
counted as tax hikes. "We faced a huge budget gap, but I recognize that
raising taxes could lead to a slowdown in our economy," he
said in 2007. "So we
didn't do it." Unfortunately, Massachusetts's largest business lobbying
group "respectfully
disagreed" with Romney's assessment. "These
certainly were tax increases and a new source of revenue for the
commonwealth," said Brian Gilmore, executive vice president of Associated
Industries of Massachusetts. "His indicating that he balanced a budget
without raising taxes is misleading at best."
Although neither has yet had to
defend his résumé on the national stage, Pawlenty and Barbour are likely to
follow a similar path in 2012. Appearing at the Conservative Political
Action Conference in February,
Pawlenty told his
fellow Republicans that "the naysayers say ‘we can't cut spending; we can't
prioritize; we have to raise taxes.' I drew a line in the sand and said,
‘Absolutely not. We're going to live within our means just like families,
just like businesses, just like everybody else.'" He delivered a similar
message at a pair of Tea Party Tax Day rallies
last week. The
problem, sadly, is that state and local taxes increased for 90 percent of
Minnesotans on Pawlenty's watch,
according to local observers.
Some of those increases, like a $200 million tax hike on cigarette consumers
in 2005, a $109 million corporate tax hike in 2008, and various fee hikes on
parking tickets, marriage licenses, building permits, court cases, and
college tuition, were backed or allowed by Pawlenty. Others, like a $2.7
billion (or 53.8 percent)
increase in property taxes
from 2003 to 2008, stemmed from the governor's policies. "In constant 2010
dollars, state aid to local governments has fallen by $2.6 billion since
2002,"
writes Minnesota
policy analyst Jeff Van Wychen. "In response, local governments have
increased property taxes." (Daniels and Romney also shifted the tax burden
from state to local government by slashing aid.)
Barbour, meanwhile, is starting
to sound a lot like Huckabee, his former neighbor to the northwest. In a
speech last month to
the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, the Mississippi governor accused Obama
of "call(ing) for record tax increases" and claimed that his own
record—filling a $720 million budget deficit in two years without raising
taxes—represented a counterpoint to Obama's failures. But although Barbour's
accomplishments are admirable—they came at a time when post-Katrina federal
aid had dwindled and recession-era unemployment was hovering near 20 percent
in some parts of Mississippi—it's simply wrong to suggest that they didn't
involve tax hikes. As the libertarian Cato Institute
noted in 2010 when it
awarded Barbour a "C" for his tax policies, the governor reinstated a
hospital-bed tax in 2008 to help fund Medicaid and approved a 50-cent
cigarette tax the following year.
The math is simple. Five
potential Republican presidential nominees. Dozens of tax hikes. The point
here, however, is not to play "gotcha," although it will be worthwhile to
keep these numbers in mind when Romney & Co. inevitably begin to attack
Obama on taxes. (For the record, Obama's tax record is mixed as well:
According to Politifact,
the president "raised taxes on cigarettes and indoor tanning, and the
health-care law includes a tax penalty on the uninsured... [and] new taxes
on the wealthy," but he also
lightened the tax burden
for more than 80 percent of Americans by changing withholding rates and
reducing payroll taxes by
2 percent.
The point isn't even that Romney,
Barbour, Daniels, Pawlenty, and Huckabee have done something wrong. In fact,
quite the opposite. In the months ahead, as the great deficit debate takes
shape and the 2012 campaign begins in earnest, voters should remember the
reality of Republicans and taxes: that even the politicians now vying to
lead the most taxophobic party in U.S. history decided to implement tax
hikes when they actually had to balance a budget. It's some of the strongest
evidence yet that we can't afford to take any budget-balancing options off
the table—even if the people who provided it would like to pretend
otherwise.
Excerpted from an article by John Dickerson, Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007In the authenticity contest underway among the GOP
presidential candidates, Mitt Romney recently boasted he was from "the Republican wing of the
Republican party." You won't find that line in Reagan's diaries or the new Barry
Goldwater film or even mumbled on the Nixon tapes. Romney was quoting Democrats. Sen. Paul Wellstone
popularized the quip when talking about his party, and Howard
Dean made it famous in the 2004 Democratic primary campaign. Republicans are allowed
to quote only one liberal—John Kennedy—and then only when talking about the benefits of tax cuts. But Romney's appropriation of
a legendary claim from the other party was perfect for the former Massachusetts governor
who, despite repeatedly asserting that he is the authentic conservative in the race, is
viewed by many as neither conservative nor authentic.
Mitt Romney has often undermined himself during the presidential campaign.
Even as he has asserted that he is anti-abortion, he has been dogged by video clips
and statements from his 1994 Senate and 2002gubernatorialcampaigns, in which he robustly defended a woman's right to have an
abortion. On several other subjects there also seem to be two stories: gun control (for/against); gays (their champion/not somuch); and even Ronald Reagan himself (distance/hug). The individual changes of position have caused minor irritation
for him. The cumulative effect of them all is the big problem. Taken together, they
suggest, as a nonaffiliated veteran of Republican politics put it, "that he has no
core."
Mitt Romney's biggest problem was supposed to be his
Mormon faith, but the polls don't show it—either in Iowa or nationally. These data could reflect the fact that on sensitive issues
such as race and religion, people don't want to give a pollster an answer that makes them
sound like a bigot. But if large numbers were truly concerned about Romney's religion,
they'd pick someone else when asked who they want to be president, and Romney wouldn't be
ahead in Iowa
and New
Hampshire polls and climbing in South Carolina.
But ask voters about Romney's flip-flops, and they speak
out loud. In a recent Des Moines Registerpoll, likely caucus attendees listed Romney's multiple positions as
his biggest liability—on par with Rudy Giuliani's pro-choice stance on abortion. In a
Pew Center poll, only 12 percent of respondents thought of Mitt Romney when the
word honest was presented to them, the lowest of the four major Republican
candidates. A Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that only 13 percent of Republicans find Mitt Romney
honest and trustworthy, also the lowest of the four major Republican candidates. A
CNN/Opinion Research poll found that 15 percent of adults found Mitt Romney to be the most
honest—again, the bottom of the field.
Like all of the big questions that dog the candidates,
this problem has been with Romney for a while—even before the presidential race.
"He's not pro-choice or anti-choice," said Senate opponent Ted Kennedy in 1994.
"He's multiple choice." Romney hasn't been able to dispense with questions about
his constancy, and the concerns are only becoming more relevant as Republicans fight over
which candidate is a more genuine conservative.
As John Kerry learned painfully in 2004, calling someone
a phony works, no matter the topic under discussion. John McCain was the first opponent to
raise the issue during a debate with Romney about immigration. "I haven't changed my
position on even numbered years or because of the different offices I've been running
for," McCain said.
In the last week, McCain has issued the same charge again and again. In a GOP debate last week, Rudy Giuliani ended an exchange with
Romney over the line-item veto by saying, "You have to be honest with people, and you
can't fool all the people all the time.
GovWatch: 2002: “preserve & protect” right to choose
Top Romney Flip Flops: #1. Abortion:
In October 2002, campaigning for
governorship of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney said he would “preserve and
protect” a woman’s right to choose. He now describes himself as opposing
abortion.
Supreme Court had said feds should stay out of abortion
Q: Why such a dramatic and profound change after pledging never to waiver on
a woman’s right to choose?
A: I was always personally opposed to abortion,
as I think almost everyone in this nation is. And the question for me was,
what is the role of government? And it was quite theoretical and
philosophical to consider what the role of government should be in this
regard, and I felt that the Supreme Court had spoken and that government
shouldn’t be involved and let people make their own decision. That all made
a lot of sense to me. Then I became governor and the theoretical became
reality. A bill came to my desk which related to the preservation of life. I
recognized that I simply could not be part of an effort that would cause the
destruction of human lift. And I didn’t hide from that change of heart. I
recognize it’s a change. Every piece of legislation which came to my desk in
the coming years as the governor, I came down on the side of preserving the
sanctity of life.
I took action as governor to preserve the sanctity of life
Q: Do you believe life begins at conception?
A: I do. I believe from a
political perspective that life begins at conception. I don’t pretend to
know, if you will, from a theological standpoint when life begins. I’d
committed to the people of Massachusetts that I would not change the laws
one way or the other, and I honored that commitment. But each law that was
brought to my desk attempted to expand abortion rights and, in each case, I
vetoed that effort. I also promoted abstinence education in our schools. I
vetoed an effort, for instance, to give young women a morning after pill who
did not have prescriptions. So I took action to preserve the sanctity of
life. But I did not violate my word, of course.
No punishment for women who have partial birth abortions
Q: What would be the legal consequences to people who participated in
illegal abortions?
A: They would be like the consequences associated with
the bill relating to partial birth abortion which does not punish the woman.
No one I know of is calling for punishing the woman. In the case of a
doctor, the kinds of penalties would be potentially losing a license or
having some other kind of restriction. In the case of partial birth
abortion, as I recall, the penalty is a possible prison term not to exceed
two years. But generally the medical profession would immediately follow the
law. That’s not going to be an issue. And there would be a recognition that
one’s license was at risk if one violated the law.
Outlaw embryo farming, but allow using surplus embryos
Q: You previously stated: “[the] United States House of Representatives
voted for a bill that was identical to what I proposed. They voted to
provide surplus embryos from in vitro fertilization processes being used for
research and experimentation. That’s what I said I support.” Do you still
support that?
A: I have the same position. From a legal standpoint, I
would outlaw cloning to create new stem cells and I would outlaw embryo
farming. I would allow, on a private basis, the use of surplus embryos from
in vitro fertilization. In terms of funding, I think the best source of our
funding application should be in what are known as alternative methods. And
this just recent. I’ve been fighting for this for some time. But this
recently saw a major breakthrough with direct reprogramming of human adult
cells to become stem cells that can be very potent cells applied to help
cure disease and serious conditions.
FactCheck: TV ad ignores recency of conversion to pro-life
Romney’s Iowa TV ad says portrays both Romney and Huckabee as “two good
family men” who are “both pro-life.” The ad presents a too-sharp focus when
it implies that Romney and Huckabee have identical records on abortion.
It’s true that both Huckabee and Romney oppose abortion--now. But Huckabee
was pro-life while he was governor. Romney, not so much. Don’t take our word
for it. Here’s Romney at a September debate in Iowa: “I never said I was
pro-choice, but my position was effectively pro-choice. I’ve said that time
and time again. I’ve changed my position.“
We don’t begrudge Romney the right to change his mind, and he’s been open
about the fact that his position has changed. But many Iowa voters may still
be unaware of that, and this ad implies that there’s no difference between
these two candidates on abortion. That’s a stretch.
I was effectively pro-choice when I ran for office. When I became governor
of Massachusetts, the first time a bill came to my life that dealt with
life, I simply could not side with--with taking a life, and I came on the
side of life. Every bill that came to my desk, every issue that related to
protecting the sanctity of life, I came down on the side of life. I’m
pro-life. I’m not going to apologize for becoming pro-life. I’m proud to be
pro-life.
Source: 2007 Des Moines Register
Republican Debate Dec 12, 2007
Would be delighted to sign federal ban on all abortions
Q: If hypothetically, Roe v. Wade was overturned, and the Congress passed a
federal ban on all abortions and it came to your desk, would you sign it?
A: Let me say it. I’d be delighted to sign that bill. But that’s not where
we are. That’s not where America is today. Where America is is ready to
overturn Roe v. Wade and return to the states that authority. But if the
Congress got there, we had that kind of consensus in that country, terrific.
Source: 2007 GOP YouTube debate in St.
Petersburg, Florida Nov 28, 2007
Two-step process: overturn Roe; then change hearts & minds
Q: Your aides say you see ending abortion as a two-step process: rolling
back Roe v. Wade, which would leave it legal in some states; and then a
constitutional amendment to ban it nationwide. If abortion is murder, how
can you live with it being legal in some states?
A: I’d love to have an
America that didn’t have abortion. But that’s not what the American people
[want] right now. And so I’d like to see Roe v. Wade overturned and allow
the states to put in place pro-life legislation. I recognize that for many
people, that is considered an act of murder, to have an abortion. It is
without question the taking of a human life. And I believe that a civilized
society must respect the sanctity of the human life. But we have two lives
involved here--a mom, an unborn child. We have to have concern for both
lives & show the expression of our compassion & our consideration and work
to change hearts & minds, and that’s the way in my view we’ll ultimately
have a society without abortion.
2005: Vetoed availability without Rx of morning-after pill
In 2005, Romney vetoed a bill making the morning-after pill available
without a doctor’s prescription. For Romney, it was not only about
contraception. He explained his decision in July 2005: “This bill does not
require parental consent for even young teenagers. It disregards not only
the seriousness of abortion but the importance of parental involvement.”
These vetoes were overturned by the Massachusetts State Legislature where
pro-choice Democrats hold an overwhelming majority.
Source: The Man, His Values, & His
Vision, p. 52 Aug 31, 2007
Firmly in the “legal but rare” camp
According to Pew Research on abortion, “most Americans fall in between,
preferring what might be described as a ‘legal but rare’ stance.” About 1/3
of Americans would make abortion illegal except in cases of rape or incest,
or to save a woman’s life. Most Americans share the common ground. Who wants
abortion to be legal but rare?
64% of conservative Republicans
66% of moderate/liberal Republicans
59% of Moderate/conservative Democrats
52% of Independents
27% of Liberal Democrats--they don’t want to compromise.
Mitt Romney is firmly in the “legal but rare camp” camp. Like 2/3 of
conservative Republicans, he believes abortion should be permitted in cases
of rape, incest, or when the mother’s life is threatened.
Governor Romney
changed his mind on abortion. He freely admits it. Ordinary citizens change
their minds, and their positions evolve in private. For public figures,
however, every video clip and interview is posted somewhere in cyberspace.
Following in Reagan’s footsteps in converting to pro-life
Q: In the debate last week, you said, “When I first ran for office [I was]
deeply opposed to abortion but [I said] I’d support the current law.” But
back then you said a lot more than just you support the current law. In
1994, you said, “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this
country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years that
we should sustain & support it.” In 2002, you said, “I will preserve and
protect a woman’s right to choose. I will not change any provisions of
Massachusetts’ pro-choice laws.“ For 8 years you said that you would protect
& respect a woman’s right to choose.
Q: Yes, that’s right. But when I
became governor I laid out in my view that a civilized society must respect
the sanctity of life. And you know what? I’m following in some pretty good
footsteps. It’s exactly what Ronald Reagan did. As governor, he was
adamantly pro-choice. He became pro-life as he experienced life. And the
same thing happened with George H. W. Bush.
Q: [to Brownback]: Your campaign has been making phone calls to Iowa voters
about Mitt Romney:
(BEGIN AUDIO)
ANNOUNCER: Mitt Romney is telling Iowans that he is firmly pro-life.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As late as 2005, Mitt Romney
pledged to support and uphold pro-abortion policies and pass taxpayer
funding of abortions in Massachusetts. His wife, Ann, has contributed
money to Planned Parenthood. Mitt told the National Abortion Rights
Action League that, “You need someone like me in Washington.“
(END AUDIO)
Q: Do you stand by that attack?
BROWNBACK: I certainly do. There’s one
word that describes that ad, and it’s ”truthful.“ That’s a truthful ad. And
that’s what campaigns are about: for getting the truth out, expressing the
differences between candidates.
Q: Is everything in that ad true?
ROMNEY: Virtually nothing in that ad is true. I am pro-life. That’s the
truth. Every action I’ve taken as governor of Massachusetts has been
pro-life.
Tired of holier-than-thou attitude about becoming pro-life
Q: [to Romney]: Are any of the specifics true in Sen. Brownback’s phone ad
calling you pro-choice?
ROMNEY: Abortion is a very difficult decision.
We’re involved in the lives of two people: a mom and an unborn child. I’ve
come down on the side of saying I’m in favor of life. The best way you can
learn about someone is not by asking their opponent, but ask them, “What do
you believe, and what’s your view?” And I am pro-life. And virtually every
part of that ad is inaccurate. I’m pro-life. My positions are pro-life.
BROWNBACK: You can go on YouTube and see the governor speaking himself
about where he is on this position in 1994.
ROMNEY: Look, I was pro-choice. I am pro-life. You can go back to YouTube
and look at what I said in 1994. I never said I was pro-choice, but my
position was effectively pro-choice. I changed my position. And I get tired
of people that are holier-than-thou because they’ve been pro-life longer
than I have. But I’m proud of the fact.
Absolute good day for America when Roe v. Wade is repealed
Q: Would the day that Roe v. Wade is repealed be a good day for America?
ROMNEY: Absolutely.
BROWNBACK: It would be a glorious day of human liberty and freedom.
GILMORE: Yes, it was wrongly decided.
HUCKABEE: Most certainly.
HUNTER: Yes.
THOMPSON: Yes.
McCAIN: A repeal.
GIULIANI: It would be OK to repeal.
TANCREDO: After 40 million dead because we have aborted them in this
country, that would be the greatest day in this country’s history when that,
in fact, is overturned.
Source: 2007 GOP primary debate, at
Reagan library, hosted by MSNBC May 3, 2007
Personally pro-life, but government should not intrude
Q: In recent months, you’ve said you were “always for life,” but we’ve also
heard you say you were once “effectively pro-choice.” Which is it?
I’ve
always been personally pro-life, but for me, it was a great question about
whether or not government should intrude in that decision. And when I ran
for office, I said I’d protect the law as it was, which is effectively a
pro-choice position.
Source: 2007 GOP primary debate, at
Reagan library, hosted by MSNBC May 3, 2007
Was effectively pro-choice until cloning changed his opinion
Q: You were effectively pro-choice as governor?
A: About two years ago,
when we were studying cloning in our state, I said, look, we have gone too
far. It’s a “brave new world” mentality that Roe v. Wade has given us, and I
changed my mind. I took the same course that Ronald Reagan took, and I said
I was wrong and changed my mind and said I’m pro-life. And I’m proud of
that, and I won’t apologize to anybody for becoming pro-life.
Q: Some people are going to see those changes of mind as awfully
politically convenient.
A: When I ran for the first time, I said I was personally pro-life but
that I would protect a woman’s right to choose as the law existed. Two years
ago, as a result of the debate we had, the conclusion I reached was that
cloning and creating new embryos was wrong, and that we should, therefore,
allow our state to become a pro-life state. I believe states should have the
right to make this decision, and that’s a position I indicated in an op-ed
in the Boston Globe 2 years ago.
Altered nuclear transfer instead of embryonic stem cells
Q: Would you expand federal funding of embryonic stem cell research?
A: It
certainly will. Altered nuclear transfer, I think, is perhaps the best
source.
Q: Embryonic.
A: Altered nuclear transfer creates embryo-like cells that can be used
for stem cell research. In my view, that’s the most promising source. I have
a deep concern about curing disease. I have a wife that has a serious
disease that could be affected by stem cell research and others. But I will
not create new embryos through cloning or through embryo farming, because
that will be creating life for the purpose of destroying it.
Q: And you won’t take any from these fertility clinics to use either?
A: It’s fine for that to be allowed, to be legal. I won’t use our
government funds for that. Instead, I want our governments to be used on
altered nuclear transfer.
Breach of Constitution for justices to adjust Constitution
Romney said this about the Supreme Court and potential justice nominees: “I
believe the Constitution embodies the values that the Founders thought were
critical for a successful nation to survive; therefore, justices have to
hold true to the Constitution to maintain the foundation of values that made
it successful. I want justices who will follow the Constitution & will not
add to it, not subtract from it but instead look to the Constitution & the
values of the Founders to set the course for the nation. We have a process
for changing the Constitution. It is an amendment process. The people are
very much involved in that process. I find it a breach of the constitutional
path for justices to effectively change the Constitution rather than allow
the constitutionally devised processes for making those adjustments occur. I
thought both Justices Robert and Alito were ideal examples for what we
should select for justices going forward. I know I depart from my liberal
friends on this front.“
Now firmly pro-life, despite 2002 tolerance for abortion
In New Hampshire on Thursday, he deflected conservative concerns about his
record on gay marriage and abortion. He said he now describes himself as
“firmly pro-life,” despite citing his tolerance for abortion rights during
his 2002 gubernatorial campaign, after researching the embryonic stem cell
issue.
Source: CNN.com, “Inside Politics” Dec
22, 2006
Anti-abortion views have “evolved & deepened” while governor
When he ran for governor in 2002, Romney pledged not to change the state’s
abortion laws, despite his personal opposition. But his veto Monday of an
emergency contraceptives bill & his comments in recent months have fueled
speculation among critics that Romney is hardening his opposition to
abortion and other sensitive social issues to gain support from GOP
conservatives. Romney says his anti-abortion views have “evolved and
deepened” since he took office, colored in part by the debate over embryonic
stem cell research.
“In considering the issue of embryo cloning and embryo farming, I saw
where the harsh logic of abortion can lead--to the view of innocent new life
as nothing more than research material or a commodity to be exploited,”
Romney wrote in an opinion piece in Tuesday’s Boston Globe. He also said he
believes each state should decide whether to allow abortion, rather than
having the “one size fits all” precedent of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973
Supreme Court case that legalized abortion.
Source: Associated Press on NewsMax.com
Jul 27, 2005
Personally against abortion, but pro-choice as governor
Romney was asked to clarify his position on abortion. Romney’s stance
appeared to have changed between his 1994 campaign against Sen. Kennedy and
when he moved to Utah. He recently told a Salt Lake City newspaper that he
preferred not to be labeled “pro- choice.”
“On a personal basis, I don’t
favor abortion,” he said. “However, as governor of the commonwealth, I will
protect a woman’s right to choose under the laws of the country and the
commonwealth. That’s the same position I’ve had for many years.”
Source: Erik Arvidson, Lowell Sun Mar
20, 2002
For safe, legal abortion since relative’s death from illegal
Romney disclosed that he became committed to legalized abortion after a
relative died during an illegal abortion. The disclosure came after Romney,
who said he is personally opposed to abortion, was asked to reconcile his
beliefs with his political support for abortion rights. “It is since that
time that my family will not force our beliefs on that matter,” He said the
abortion made him see “that regardless of one’s beliefs about choice, you
would hope it would be safe and legal.”
Source: Joe Battenfeld in Boston Herald
Oct 26, 1994
Stem cell research lofty goals don’t justify destroying life
Romney adopted the “pro-life” label after his battle over stem cell
research. Ann Romney has multiple sclerosis. Romney, who not surprisingly
cites the diagnosis of his wife’s disease as one of the greatest blows of
his life, is nevertheless alarmed by the aggressive program of embryonic
stem cell research consortiums. He has taken a stand against the Harvard
Stem Cell Institute.
The Harvard Stem Cell Institute was seeking legal
protection for an embryo production line for the purpose of creating and
harvesting stem cells, and Romney refused his support. He said, “Lofty goals
do not justify the creation of life for experimentation or destruction.”
Romney’s views would permit for research the use of embryos about to be
destroyed by their parents; this puts him at odds with President Bush’s more
restrictive position. Romney has never supported state-funded research on
embryonic stem cells, and is a believer in the efficacy of alternative
methods of producing stem cells.
Defining mistake: supported abortion law despite opposing it
Q: What is the defining mistake of your life and why?
A: Probably from a
political standpoint and a personal standpoint, the greatest mistake was
when I first ran for office, being deeply opposed to abortion but saying, “I
support the current law,” which was pro-choice and effectively a pro-choice
position. That was just wrong. And when I became a governor and faced a
life-and-death decision as a governor, I came down on the side of life. That
was a mistake before that.
Source: 2007 GOP Iowa Straw Poll debate
Aug 5, 2007
Would welcome overturning Roe v. Wade
Q: Would you welcome the overruling of Roe v. Wade by the Court?
A: Yes. I
would like to see each state be able to make its own decision regarding
abortion rather than have a one-size-fits-all blanket pronouncement by the
Supreme Court.
Q: Would you have a “litmus test” of any sort when it came to nominees
for the Supreme Court?
A: I think we’d all like to apply a litmus test. Each of us would like to
say, “Here are all the decisions that are going to come up. How will you
vote?” But I don’t think that’s the process that you’re going to see
employed by me or, frankly, by others as well. Doing it that way would make
it very difficult for the nominee to be confirmed. There will not be a
litmus test. Instead, there will be a philosophical test, which is: “Is this
a person who follows the law, who abides by the Constitution, who will
strictly construe the Constitution as intended, or is this a person who
looks to expand upon the Constitution to ‘write’ laws without the benefit of
legislation?”
Committed to not change law on abortion as Gov., and did not
The pro-life community is sophisticated and educated, and quite capable of
understanding how a pro-life politician in Massachusetts has to advocate for
the possible, and must not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
“I am pro-life,” Romney told me pointedly. He went on to explain how his
campaigns have provided fodder for his 2008 opponents. “In my 1994 debate
with Senator Kennedy he said that I was ‘multiple choice’ for which he got a
good laugh because I would not say I was pro-choice. I said what I would do
if I were elected senator, the same thing I said when I was running for
governor. As governor, I indicated that I would not change the law as it
related to abortion. I would keep it the same. I have had roughly four
provisions that have reached my desk which would have changed the laws as
they relate to abortion, all of which would have expanded abortion rights. I
vetoed each of those. My record as governor has been very clearly a pro-life
record.“
Opposes Roe v Wade, but won’t tamper with abortion laws
Opposes Roe v. Wade.
Believes that abortion should be banned in all cases except rape,
incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Vetoed an emergency contraception bill in July 2005.
However: Has kept campaign promise not to tamper with state abortion
laws.
Said in 1994: “I had a dear, close family relative that was very
close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. We will not force
our beliefs on others. And you will not see me wavering on that.”
Source: CivilLiberty.about.com profile
of Romney Dec 1, 2006
Vetoed emergency contraception for rape victims
Massachusetts’ Legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic, and Romney’s first
term as governor barely touched on the issues dear to social conservatives
until recently.
In May, Romney vetoed legislation to expand stem cell research because it
allowed the cloning of human embryos for use in stem cell experiments--a
practice Romney said amounts to creating life in order to destroy it. The
Legislature overrode the veto.
His veto of the emergency contraception measure is also likely to be
overridden. That bill requires hospital emergency room doctors to offer the
medication to rape victims, and would make it available without prescription
from pharmacies.
Romney is on a list of possible contenders for the White House in 2008.
Others include Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Sam
Brownback of Kansas and George Allen of Virginia, Senate Majority Leader
Bill Frist of Tennessee, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Source: Associated Press on NewsMax.com
Jul 27, 2005
Vetoed stem cell research bill
This House vote affirmed passage of the bill supporting stem cell research
as originally passed by the House and Senate, rejecting Governor Romney’s
proposed amendments and veto, and avoiding delays of implementation.
Source: MassScorecard.org Bill S. 2039 ;
roll call 69, passed 112-42 May 31, 2005
Endorsed legalization of RU-486
Favored basic Roe v. Wade abortion rights, though would not endorse
a specific version of the Freedom of Choice Act, which would codify
those court-established rights as federal law
Said he would leave the matter of Medicaid funding for abortion to
individual states
Endorsed legalization of RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug.
Source: Boston Globe review of 1994
campaign issues Mar 21, 2002
Click here for definitions & background information on
Abortion.
Mitt Romney keeps his South
Carolina headquarters in a single-story building at one end of Gervais Street, which is
Columbia’s version of Washington’s K Street, lined with the offices of local
lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and other fixers and power brokers. The main room of Romney
HQ is decorated with hand-painted red-and-blue signs, mementos from previous campaign
events: mitt is my hero! mitt’s the man! mitt’s my pick! I visited on a steamy
Monday night in late July, a time of year when few South Carolinians are interested in
politics and fewer still want their evening interrupted by pitches for a presidential
primary six months away. But eleven volunteers, mostly college students, were hunched in
cubicles spread around the office, diligently placing cold calls to area residents. Boxes
of pepperoni pizza from Domino’s (a company Romney backed when he ran the investment
firm Bain Capital) were piled on a table against a wall.
“Senator Jim DeMint asked me to call you,” said
one young woman, reading from a script into a cell phone. After running through a list of
Romney’s accomplishments—rescuing the 2000 Olympics in Salt Lake City,
“cutting a $3 billion deficit without raising taxes” while governor of
Massachusetts—she asked if her listener would be willing to join DeMint, South
Carolina’s junior senator, in supporting Romney over his Republican rivals. There was
a pause.
“Well, I understand, ma’am, there’s a long
way to go before the election,” the volunteer replied. “I just hope you’ll
keep us in mind.”
Directing the phone-bank operation was Terry Sullivan, a
thirty-three-year-old political consultant. As we spoke in his office at the back of the
headquarters, Sullivan—dressed in a blue-and-white striped shirt, jeans, and
flip-flops—pulled from a laptop on his desk a smattering of fund-raising numbers, TV
advertising rates for various states, and other political detritus. “There’s a
poll out today that shows McCain’s got 10 percent in South Carolina, and he had 36 in
April,” he said. “Rudy’s got 28 percent, Fred Thompson has 27, and
we’ve only got 7, but [Newt] Gingrich is included and that pulls straight from
us—those are Mitt Romney voters.”
South Carolina is known for its hard-charging political
consultants, and Sullivan is undeniably a rising star. After growing up in North Carolina
and serving as youth coordinator for Jesse Helms’s final Senate run in 1996, Sullivan
relocated to South Carolina the following year to work on a congressional campaign. Now he
is a partner of TTS Strategies, the consulting firm run by J. Warren Tompkins, perhaps
South Carolina’s most prominent Republican operative and Romney’s chief handler
here. Although he was reluctant to go into details about who exactly was being targeted
tonight by the campaign’s phone-bankers, Sullivan defined them broadly as “hard
cores.” He elaborated: “We set out to identify and recruit grassroots activists,
because no one else cares about the presidential election at this point. These are people
who are just about guaranteed voters, the type who turn out even for special elections.
Political campaigns are checkers, not chess. It’s largely about turnout, and that
means coming out for a candidate they are excited about or to stop a candidate that
they’re angry about.”
For at least two decades, our political landscape has
been dominated by consultants; but there is no presidential campaign this year whose
success or failure so will depend on media managers, marketing strategists, and political
gurus as that of Mitt Romney. Unlike his chief competitors for the Republican nomination,
he started out with a fairly low national profile and hence has needed to be introduced
and marketed to a national audience. And the task of reformulating and repackaging the
Romney brand—from the moderate Republican governor of the most liberal state in the
Union to a red-meat social conservative and heir to Reagan—has been entrusted to an
army of consultants far larger than that of any of his challengers. Campaign disclosure
records are convoluted and poorly categorized, so it’s difficult to make a precise
inventory. But based on filings with the Federal Election Commission, as of this summer,
Romney’s campaign has employed more than a hundred different consultants, making
combined payments to them of at least $11 million—roughly three times the amount
spent by John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. Much of that money paid for the creation and
placement of TV ads through Romney’s media consultant and chief strategist, Alex
Castellanos, but the campaign also spent heavily on polling, political strategy, and voter
mobilization.
A strong showing in South Carolina is critical to
Romney’s ambitions. Since 1980, the year of the first primary here, no Republican has
ever gained his party’s nomination without winning the state, which is traditionally
seen as the “Gateway to Dixie” and a key indicator of Southern support. If
Romney—who prior to running for president was deemed so moderate in his politics that
Human Events magazine put him on its list of the top ten “Republicans in Name
Only”—can win over South Carolina’s conservative electorate, it augurs well
for his chances in states where the party faithful are less fervent. It is a daunting
sales job, but Sullivan was confident that Romney’s poll numbers in the state would
eventually rise. “Everyone here knows Giuliani and McCain, and who doesn’t like
Arthur Branch?” he said with a smile, referring to the character Thompson plays on
the television show Law & Order. “We haven’t spent money yet to get
[our message] out.”
He was talking mostly about TV advertising, but only a
month later, a striking reminder came to light of just how South Carolina consultants tend
to get their messages out. The Washington Post discovered that an anti–Fred
Thompson smear site, entitled PhoneyFred.org, was being run by an executive of TTS
Strategies. The site was immediately taken down; Romney made pains to distance himself
from it, and so—much less believably—did Tompkins, who claimed an employee had
conceived and run the site without his knowledge. Whatever the truth of the site’s
origin, the PhoneyFred episode perhaps most vividly showed that when one is contemplating
how to sell Mitt Romney, the problem of phoniness can never be far from the brain.
Earlier this year, the Boston Globe obtained
a copy of an internal campaign PowerPoint presentation that outlined Romney’s
strengths and weaknesses as he embarked on his presidential bid. One page—entitled
“Primal Code for Brand
Romney”—explained that Romney should market
himself as a foil to such Massachusetts liberals as Senators Edward Kennedy and John
Kerry, and also run against such “enemies” as Hollywood, France, and “moral
relativism.” Problems identified by the campaign included the perception that Romney
would not make a tough wartime leader and the possibility that voters would be spooked by
his Mormon religion.
The presentation also acknowledged the problematic view
that Romney is a “phony” and a “political opportunist”; but that view
is due at least in part to the fact that by any reasonable standard it’s true. The
basic contours of his opportunism are by now fairly well known. During Romney’s
unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate against Edward Kennedy in 1994, he espoused liberal
beliefs on a number of social issues. A politically damaging clip from a campaign debate
that year has surfaced, inevitably, on YouTube; it shows Romney posing as an advocate for
gays, women, and minorities, and—in perhaps his gravest sacrilege—distancing
himself from the political legacy of Ronald Reagan. Romney, Brent Bozell wrote the day
after the debate in a piece for UPI, had “demonstrated very clearly . . . that he has
more in common with liberal Democrats than he does with Conservatives.”
During the 1994 campaign, Romney’s then (and
current) political consultant Charles Manning described Kennedy as a political opportunist
on abortion. “He was pro-life before Roe v. Wade and now he’s
changed,” Manning said. “Mitt has always been consistent in his pro-choice
position.” Manning was citing a twenty-three-year-old letter as evidence that Kennedy
was a hypocrite. Campaign foes of the now pro-life Romney don’t need to go back
nearly as far to do the same to him. In 2002, a Democratic opposition-research specialist
named Jason Stanford was hired by a pro-choice group to research a number of Republican
candidates nationwide. In the end, the group decided Romney was too liberal to oppose.
“He wasn’t pure on choice, but they thought he was saying the right thing from a
liberal, Democratic perspective,” Stanford told me. “And these are 100
percenters—you’re either for us or against us.”
It’s not just Romney’s flexibility on the
issues that troubles people. A related problem is the sense that whatever his political
convictions may be, he’s not passionate about them. As with the charge of political
opportunism, there appears to be some truth to that perception. “Religion, family,
and business were his focus,” a person who worked for Romney in a previous campaign
told me. “He didn’t have strong opinions on the major issues of the day.”
This person, who admires Romney but is not supporting him in his presidential bid, found
it frustrating to see him now veer so sharply to the right, particularly on immigration.
“He knows better, because he understands business and the economy and trade,” he
said. “It’s an easy political position for him to take and a hard one for McCain
and the president, who was governor of Texas. My guess is that he thought about the pros
and cons, made a calculation, and picked a spot further out on the political
spectrum.”
The image of slickness is heightened by Romney’s
appearance and persona, which might be genuine but—because he seems like a
computer-generated composite—invariably appears contrived. Everything about Romney
looks and sounds manufactured: the pretty blonde wife and five Leave It to Beaver
sons, the jutting Dick Tracy jaw, the ramrod-straight posture, the “say cheese”
smile, and the Reaganesque hair, which even the campaign PowerPoint worried might be too
perfect. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Romney had spent several hundred dollars
of campaign funds for the ministrations of Hidden Beauty, a California company that
describes itself as “a mobile beauty team for hair, makeup and men’s grooming
and spa services.” This did not help the governor’s reputation for being a
prepackaged candidate, though Stacy Andrews, who owns Hidden Beauty, said he barely needed
makeup. “He’s already tan,” she told reporters. “We basically put a
drop of foundation on him . . . and we powdered him a little bit.”
Romney’s speeches and public appearances seem
particularly vapid. “There is no place that is more important to the future strength
of America than the American home,” he said during a South Carolina stop. “The
work that goes on within the walls of a home is the most important work that is ever done
in America.” And even by the debased standards of contemporary political propaganda,
his advertising looks remarkably hokey. Of particular note is a thirteen-minute,
faux-cinéma-vérité video, posted on the campaign website, that shows Romney and his
family sitting in their living room and having a supposedly spontaneous, unrehearsed
conversation about whether Dad should run for president. The conversation took place last
Christmas, and even though it was by then obvious to the entire country that he was
running, Romney is seen dutifully taking down the pros and cons on a writing pad.
Some voters, understandably, question what Romney truly
stands for, if anything. Conservatives in particular seem unconvinced of his sincerity,
and that could be fatal in a state like South Carolina. “We may not be the smartest
people in the country, but we know how to spot a fake,” a political consultant and
popular blogger named Will Folks replied instantly when I asked why Romney had, at least
until then, fared poorly in state polls.
Political consultants probably have a more exalted
position in South Carolina than anywhere else in the country. The reasons for that
aren’t entirely clear, but it likely has something to do with the state’s small
size and tight political networks, both of which have allowed consultants to emerge as
power brokers. It’s also probably connected to the legacy of Lee Atwater, one of the
state’s most famous political figures. “Atwater was not a policy wonk, he was a
strategist,” Lee Bandy, a longtime columnist and reporter for The State, the
Columbia daily newspaper, told me. “And his strategy was to destroy his opponent. He
was good at not leaving a trail. I’d tell him, ‘Lee, I know you did it, but I
can’t find your fingerprints.’”
There are bitter rivalries among the big-name players,
and consequently races here tend to be particularly hard-fought. Warren Tompkins’s
chief adversary is Richard Quinn Sr., who ran McCain’s state campaign in 2000 and is
doing so again this time around. Each has a loyal circle of associates, and state
politicos frequently are labeled as belonging to one camp or the other. Quinn tends to be
the more conservative of the two—he led the battle to keep the Confederate flag atop
the capitol dome, founded a neo-Confederate magazine called Southern Partisan, and
worked for the presidential campaigns of Pat Robertson in 1988 and Pat Buchanan in
1996—but the feud between them is personal, not ideological. Six years ago, Senator
Lindsay Graham hired them both as a means of preventing internecine campaign warfare.
The power of the consultant class has contributed to
South Carolina’s reputation as a swamp of dirty politics. In 1980, Atwater served as
a consultant to G.O.P. congressional candidate Floyd Spence in his race against Tom
Turnipseed, a heavily favored Democrat. Turnipseed had suffered from depression as a
teenager and undergone electroshock therapy; Atwater ensured that became a campaign issue
by planting a fake reporter at a press conference who innocently inquired as to whether
Turnipseed had ever “had psychotic treatment.” In comments to reporters, Atwater
remarked that Turnipseed had been “hooked up to jumper cables” one too many
times. Spence won; the Republican National Committee soon hired Atwater.
A common practice in state politics has been the
exploitation of race and religion. “In both cases, it drew upon intense, visceral
fears on the part of large numbers of white voters that they were facing a life and death
struggle, first to maintain white supremacy and later to prevent the rise of a godless
political culture,” says Dan Carter, a former professor of American history at the
University of South Carolina. Rod Shealy, who once worked under Atwater and is currently
considered by many South Carolina insiders to be the smartest and shrewdest of the
state’s consultants, gained a bit of national notoriety in 1990, when he was running
the campaign of his sister, Sherry Martschink, a candidate for lieutenant governor. Shealy
was looking to increase the Republican primary turnout of racially conservative
low-country voters, a group largely sympathetic to Martschink. To do so, he recruited
Benjamin Hunt Jr., an unemployed black fisherman, to run for Congress in the Republican
primary against incumbent Arthur Ravenel Jr. Shealy paid Hunt’s filing fee, gave him
$500, and mailed out thousands of hunt for congress leaflets showing the candidate with a
Kentucky Fried Chicken sign in the background. “Many of us heard about Rod’s
story and thought, ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’” Terry Sullivan
said with a laugh when the subject came up. “It’s one of those harebrained
schemes that you dream up in the middle of the night and wonder, ‘Would that be
illegal?’”
Given the state’s history of political dirty tricks,
it wasn’t exactly a surprise when the PhoneyFred.org story emerged in September. The
site ripped Thompson as a fake conservative, bestowing on him such labels as “Phoney
Fred,” “Fancy Fred,” “Flip-Flop Fred,” “Moron Fred,”
and “Playboy Fred.” Tompkins said the site was solely the work of an employee,
Wesley Donehue, who (so Tompkins and Romney’s staff claimed) did not work directly
for the campaign—despite the fact that Romney had retained not only TTS (whose
“daily operations” Donehue was running, according to the firm’s own
literature) but also a direct-mail company, where Donehue worked. But Tompkins and
Sullivan held firm in denying their own involvement, and as of press time they were still
employed by the Romney campaign. “[Q]uite frankly I am very internet
dysfunctional,” Tompkins claimed in an email after the story broke. “Anyone who
knows me would laugh at the prospect of my even being involved in such an
undertaking.”
* * *
This past summer, I visited Tompkins at his
twelfth-floor office on Gervais Street, overlooking the state capitol. “National
consultants don’t understand the nuances of South Carolina,” he told me.
“We understand the state, the voters, how to reach them, and how to motivate them.
And when you hire me, you get my network, my friends and associates, the people who go
where I go.”
Of the dozen or so consultants I met in South Carolina,
Tompkins is the only one who looks as if he would fit in as well in Washington as at home.
Smooth and corporate, he wore a stylish blue suit and snappy, polished dress shoes.
Photographs on his office walls include shots of Tompkins with former South Carolina
Senator Strom Thurmond, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush, all past clients. Along with
Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, Tompkins was a key architect of Bush’s victory over
McCain in the 2000 South Carolina primary. That race is often seen as the ugliest one of
modern times, with rumors spread—often via anonymous flyers, phones without caller
ID, and untraceable email addresses—that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black
child, that his wife was a drug addict, and that he favored removing tax-exempt status
from churches.
One of Tompkins’s primary jobs in that campaign was
to mobilize the religious right for Bush. “The first thing we had to do was build a
wall between McCain and the social conservatives,” Tompkins later explained. “If
we didn’t do that, we were dead. That’s why we went to Bob Jones,” by which
he meant Bush’s notorious visit to the Christian university that then had a
longstanding ban on interracial dating. And in a meeting of Bush’s high-level South
Carolina strategists, Tompkins advocated a general hard-line approach. “We
aren’t going to pussyfoot around,” Tompkins told the group. “We play it
different down here. We’re not dainty, if you get my drift.” But when I asked
him about South Carolina’s reputation for dirty pool, he shrugged it off. “Our
goal,” he told me, “is to win within taste, reason, and the law.”
For the most part, Tompkins sees Romney as an easy sell.
“You need three things to win: a messenger, a message, and money,” he said.
“He’s bright, articulate, clean, has good moral character, and looks good on TV.
He’s the complete and total package. Not to make a comparison to Ronald Reagan, but
he has the same qualities: he’s got a good sense of humor and is a great
communicator.” The flip-flop charges were not an issue, said Tompkins, who argued
that Romney’s only real inconsistency was on the issue of abortion. “He flat
changed his position. That will be acceptable, because since Roe v. Wade
we’ve been seeking converts. He’s a success story—that will be a plus for
us.”
The only worry in Tompkins’s mind was the
governor’s current state of residence. “Since I was a kid, Massachusetts has
been the whipping boy down here,” he said. “JFK was from there and Teddy,
Michael Dukakis, John Kerry, Barney Frank. When all else fails, you try to link your
opponent to Massachusetts. We have to sell his record there. He got elected as a
Republican and did things the right way. He cut taxes, solved the health-care crisis, and
put business principles ahead of expansion of government.”
Tompkins sees Romney’s strategic position in South
Carolina as being formidable. In his view, Giuliani can’t win the primary because of
his stance on abortion and gay rights, not to mention his three marriages and general lack
of family values. “If it’s Romney versus Giuliani, we win if we do our job
right,” he said, and one could almost hear the wheels turning in his mind at the
delicious prospect of that matchup. “Social groups, right-to-life organizations, the
Bob Jones crowd are all sitting on the sidelines, but Rudy scares them, and when a
conservative alternative comes to the top, they will move there. If it’s a four-way
race, 35 percent wins, and the question is where do you get it. It’s all about
organizing, finding the voters, and making sure they vote. We’re trying to win the
war of the activists, and we’re doing well so far.”
Asked about the Democratic race, Tompkins didn’t
hesitate to pick Hillary Clinton as the likely nominee. “With Hillary we could gin up
the vote, but it would be a mistake to underestimate her,” he said. “She’ll
have the money and she has the best people. They are good, tough, and ruthless, and will
do whatever they need to win.” One gathered that this, from Tompkins, was the highest
praise.
* * *
In 1988, Time magazine ran a cover story
entitled “It’s the Year of the Handlers,” which noted that more than
“any other race in history, this has become a narrow-gauge contest between two
disciplined teams of political professionals.” The magazine complained that the
foremost goal of the campaigns of both George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis was to
“prevent their candidates from uttering a spontaneous thought in public,” and
that “backstage puppeteers” were directing the entire race.
“Something,” Time concluded, “has truly gone awry in 1988.” It
was the year that Lee Atwater unleashed the infamous ad about Willie Horton, the black
convict who terrorized a white couple while out on a weekend pass from a Massachusetts
prison; the ad is widely credited with clinching Bush’s victory. Ever since then, the
tough, savvy campaign consultant—from James Carville to Karl Rove—has become a
standard character in any presidential-campaign narrative.
What has changed in the past two decades is the sheer
quantity of different handlers who massage the entire electoral process from announcement
to inauguration. Campaign & Elections magazine publishes an annual directory of
political consultants, and the 2007 edition lists thousands of practitioners, in
categories that include events planning, crisis management, direct mail, fund-raising,
GOTV (Get Out the Vote), grassroots strategy, Internet, mailing and phone lists, speech
training, media buying, polling, voice-over talent, and voter registration. All of this
has in turn contributed to the ever-rising costs of campaigns. A study last year by the
Center for Public Integrity found that political-consulting firms received combined
payments of $1.85 billion for federal campaigns during the 2003–2004 election cycle.
In the case of the 2008 Romney campaign, the roster
includes a host of speechwriters, among them Matt Rees, who served in the George W. Bush
White House producing speeches for the president and for National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice. Then there are the finance consultants, paid to strengthen Romney’s
fund-raising effort (and thereby allow him to hire more consultants); these firms include
the California-based Davis Group, which worked for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
gubernatorial campaign and for Bush/Cheney 2000. Romney has employed a number of firms to
stage his campaign events, among them Political Productions, which was paid $20,800 to
help choreograph his announcement ceremony in February. The firm is headed by David
Grossman, who has handled rallies for President Bush, produced and designed the 2001
inaugural parade, and helped prepare the Desert Storm victory celebration in Washington
during the term of George H.W. Bush. (Political Productions is also, according to its
website, “the leader in confetti services for the political production market,”
and its team of professional confetti-releasers assures that a “synchronized
event” will come off flawlessly “with all elements occurring on cue when and
where you want. With only 20 to 30 seconds following each speech available for a headline
photo opportunity or a video lead-in clip, why chance your production to anyone but the
leader in political production?”)
In an especially calculated move, the Romney campaign has
invested heavily in winning local straw polls around the country, which don’t
necessarily measure popular support as much as organization and financial resources.
Nonetheless, victory can win a news cycle’s worth of attention and hence be used to
hype the candidate’s supposed popularity and momentum. In Iowa, Romney hired Nicole
Schlinger, founder of Capitol Resources, Inc., a G.O.P.-event-management firm, as his
straw-poll director. She helped orchestrate Romney’s triumph at the Ames Straw Poll,
which was achieved by shelling out huge sums of money to buy supporters’ tickets for
the event, arranging a fleet of buses to bring them in and catering a barbecue lunch to
feed them, financing a direct-mail campaign, and paying fees to dozens of
“super-volunteers” who promoted Romney (not to mention more than $2 million in
television ads in Iowa and roughly $1 million more for organizational support, which
included the $191,000 Schlinger was paid). All this bought Romney 31.5 percent of the
ballots cast in Ames—4,516 voters, which means the campaign spent at least $650 per
vote.
To handle opposition research, the campaign has engaged
Barbara Comstock—a lawyer who worked for former Attorney General John
Ashcroft—at the price of $15,000 per month. Comstock honed her skills as research
director at the Republican National Committee and before that worked for the House
Government Reform Committee when its head, Representative Dan Burton, was leading
investigations into the Clinton-era Democratic fund-raising scandals and trying to prove
that White House counsel Vince Foster did not commit suicide but was murdered.
Comstock’s talents were on display this summer during an appearance on Hardball,
when she essentially argued that Senator Barack Obama’s support for
“age-appropriate sex education” meant that he favored educating kindergartners
about masturbation and homosexuality, and possibly abortion as well. “There are more
important issues that we need to be spending our money on other than kindergarten sex
education and funding abortions for everybody,” Comstock said.
The list of Romney’s consultants gets longer. There
is the direct-mail specialist Stephen Meyers of SCM Associates; Gary Marx, who works for
Ralph Reed at Century Strategies and rounds up social-conservative support for the
campaign, as he did for Bush/Cheney in 2004; pollster and focus-group guru Jan van
Lohuizen, who worked for the Bush Administration; and Get Out the Vote specialist Claire
Austin. Then come the hordes of local specialists hired to help Romney navigate the
terrain in individual states, especially ones that loom large in the primary schedule. In
Florida, the campaign hired political strategist Sara Bradshaw, who is to Governor Jeb
Bush what Karl Rove was to President Bush. In New Hampshire, where fiscal conservatism is
a more potent force than social conservatism, he hired as advisers moderates like Rich
Killion and Tom Rath. And in South Carolina, where religious activists have the upper
hand, he hired not only Sullivan and Tompkins but several other brand-name conservatives.
* * *
In seeking to woo conservatives, Romney has also
used his personal PAC—the Commonwealth Political Action Committee—to contribute
lavishly to several national pro-life groups, the Federalist Society, the National
Review, and the Heritage Foundation, among others. In South Carolina, Romney set up a
branch of the PAC all the way back in 2004. (He started branches in Iowa, New Hampshire,
Michigan, and Arizona at the same time.) Since then, the state branch—with guidance
from a number of consulting firms, including DC Navigators, a top Washington-based
group—has run up expenditures of roughly $518,000. Recipients in South Carolina
include dozens of state representatives as well as Lieutenant Governor André Bauer
($3,500) and Attorney General Henry McMaster ($1,000). Romney has ladled $9,500 on the
state Republican Party, $3,500 on the state Senate G.O.P. caucus, and $7,000 on the House
caucus, and has sent tens of thousands of dollars in total to numerous county-level party
committees.
Romney’s game plan in South Carolina depends on
winning a large share of the social-conservative vote, which makes up at least a third,
and perhaps even two fifths, of the state’s G.O.P. electorate. To that end, his PAC
has also funded the Palmetto Family Council, which, according to its website, “works
in the centers of influence (church, government, media, academia, and business) to present
biblical principles through research, communication and networking.” Another $5,000
was delivered from Romney’s PAC to an organization sponsoring a statewide ballot
initiative, passed in 2006, that added an amendment banning gay marriage to the state
constitution. The PAC also sent money to South Carolina Citizens for Life ($500), South
Carolina Club for Growth ($1,000), a school-choice group called South Carolinians for
Responsible Government ($1,000), a Republican GOTV effort called South Carolina Victory
($2,000), and a group of conservative school-board candidates in Charleston ($2,000)
called, humorously enough, “The A-Team.” (One pities the fool who might oppose
them.) Moreover, the Romney campaign in June formed a national “faith and values
steering committee” that includes four South Carolinians, among them a pastor, Mark
White, and a Christian political activist, Dee Benedict. Both White and Benedict—whom
Romney also put on the payroll as a consultant—are from upstate, the heart of South
Carolina conservatism.
To ensure that all this goodwill gets translated into
votes, Romney’s campaign has retained Drew McKissick, a former board member of the
Christian Coalition and state director for the campaign to ban gay marriage. “If he
[Romney] wins Iowa and New Hampshire, it puts huge pressure on the other candidates,”
he told me over coffee at a Starbucks on Gervais Street, a few blocks from his office.
“South Carolina becomes a fire wall for them to stop him.”
Like Romney, McKissick is perfectly groomed, with not a
single hair askew. He’s worked as a consultant since 1990—his first campaign was
a race for county coroner—and has arranged private meetings for Romney with Southern
Baptists, charismatics, fundamentalists, and other religious conservatives. “I help
the campaign with communications and messaging towards that sector of the party,” he
told me. “I network with people I know around the state and help them decide who
they’ll support. That’s a conversation best had in small groups. Building a
campaign is like throwing a rock in the pond. There’s a big ripple and then smaller
ripples outward. We’re focusing on the first few ripples—key leaders within
church and community, people who have networks of influence and who other people listen
to.”
McKissick helps the Romney campaign develop materials
targeted to social conservatives, such as a packet, mailed to a small group of religious
activists, that included a cover letter under his name. (McKissick and Terry Sullivan both
told me I could get a copy of the letter but in the end declined to send it.) He also
created a website, Christian Conservatives for Romney, that includes news on the campaign,
Romney videos, and summaries of the governor’s positions on such issues as
“abortion & life,” “traditional marriage,” “protecting our
children,” and “free speech.” As laid out on the website, Romney’s
position on the final item is largely confined to deploring the McCain-Feingold
campaign-finance law, which is loathed by conservatives everywhere and has cost McCain
dearly in his own extensive efforts to woo the Republican right.
Some religious voters will never see Romney as the ideal
candidate, McKissick acknowledged. His goal is to make sure that those people are
comfortable enough with the governor that they will turn to him in the event that their
first pick—McKissick didn’t name names but was certainly thinking of Sam
Brownback and Mike Huckabee, whose conservative credentials are far more solid than
Romney’s—drops out. “There is a segment of the party that is looking for
purity and is ?leery of anyone who might not meet that ideal standard,” he continued.
“I’m trying to alleviate fears that he doesn’t measure up.”
Doubts about Romney will diminish as the campaign’s
advertising kicks in, McKissick believes. “Communications is the primary purpose of
any campaign. The message with this segment of the party is shared values. What values do
you have that will carry forward in the campaign? That’s more important than a
ten-point plan. If I know his core values, I can more or less figure out where he’ll
be on the issues. That’s more important than where he goes to church on
Sundays.”
* * *
If Romney retains his current lead in the polls and
wins New Hampshire and Iowa, a victory in South Carolina’s primary could propel him
toward the nomination. If he performs less well than expected in the two key early states,
he’ll be even more desperate for a good showing here. At least through mid-September,
though, Romney had failed to find his footing; despite repeated visits to South Carolina,
and at least $1 million spent on advertising and organization, he remained mired in or
near single digits in the polls behind Giuliani, Thompson, and McCain. He will likely rise
in the polls, especially with a major TV advertising campaign planned for the fall, but
the question remains how high.
The problems holding him back were all identified in the
campaign’s PowerPoint presentation: the Massachusetts background, the image of
slickness, the fears about his religion, and, above all, mistrust of his ideological
transformation. Romney and his handlers portray him as having undergone a political
conversion, but they can’t point to any convincing catalyst. There was no religious
epiphany (as, for example, with George W. Bush) or political awakening (as with Ronald
Reagan, a New Deal Democrat who joined the Republican Party in 1962 and backed Barry
Goldwater for president two years later, which at the time was hardly a politically savvy
move). With Romney, there’s merely been the recent espousal of positions
diametrically opposed to his earlier ones, feeding the suspicion that his political shifts
are more reflective of his ambition than of his convictions.
In Mount Pleasant, at a dockside restaurant just across
the bay from Charleston, I met with Cyndi Mosteller, a social conservative who served
until recently as head of her county Republican Party and before that as vice chair of the
state G.O.P. I had expected her to exhibit a conservative persona that matched her
politics, but Mosteller, bubbly and energetic, had hair streaked with reddish highlights
and wore a sleeveless black-and-white dress with high heels. We took a window table and
watched shrimp boats bobbing on the water as we talked about the race in South Carolina.
She had started out as a McCain backer but opposed his views on issues like
embryonic-stem-cell research and immigration, and left his campaign over the summer.
Giuliani is anathema to her. “We’ve worked hard for years to hold the line on
Judeo-Christian ethics, and it would be difficult for conservatives to cast our vote,
which is our trust, for someone who disagrees with us,” she said.
But Mosteller (who not long afterward would declare her
support for Fred Thompson) is most scornful of Romney. “It’s a question of
trust,” she said. “He says all the right things, his speeches run through the
litmus test on conservative issues, but there’s no conviction behind it. Authenticity
means a lot in the South. You can’t run to the left up North and the right down here.
I find it patronizing to my intelligence, to my conservatism, and to the South.”
By all accounts, Mitt Romney is smart and
pragmatic—not at all as vacuous, that is, as he has been made to sound. The irony is
that in attempting to market him to the Republican base, his handlers have created a
thorough phony. The “electorate is not where it needs to be for us to succeed,”
his campaign PowerPoint had concluded; hence, the strategy has been to move Romney where
he needs to be to succeed. It remains to be seen how well this will play in South
Carolina.
Excerpted from an article by Matthew Yglesias at Atlantic
Magazine
Near the top of his Mitt Romney
profile, Ryan Lizza gives a good summary of the former governor's many political
transformations. A man in New Hampshire introduces himself as a hunter and asks Romney
what he's going to do about global warming. Romney notes that "to do that it’s
going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we’re
going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases." Lizza comments:
It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long
ago, Romney released a glossy pamphletdetailing his positions on major issues. He sounded
like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy
book’s treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it,
Romney refers to the “debate” over “how much human activity impacts the
environment”—code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan
to “dramatically” curtail emissions of CO2, just an aside that “we may well
be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions.” As the governor of Massachusetts,
Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon
reduction—a plan that he had supported the month before.
This is a habit of Romney’s. Politicians tend to
pander, especially during the primary season. Romney’s chief opponent, Rudy Giuliani,
also has a history as a pro-gun-control, pro-gay-rights Republican. But while Giuliani
simply downplays his record on those issues, Romney sells himself as a true convert. He
not only shifts positions; he often claims to be the most passionate advocate of his new
stances. It’s one of the reasons that his metamorphosis from liberal Republican to
committed right-winger seems so jarring. In 1994, in his race for the Senate, he
didn’t simply argue that he was a defender of gay rights; he claimed to be a stronger
advocate than his opponent, Edward Kennedy. Today, he’s not just a faithful
conservative but the only Republican candidate who represents “the Republican wing of
the Republican Party.” He brings a salesman’s bravado and certainty to issues.
At a debate in May, when asked how he would respond to a hypothetical situation involving
the interrogation of a terrorist at Guantánamo Bay, he said, “Some people have said
we ought to close Guantánamo. My view is that we ought to double Guantánamo.”
Elected as a pro-choice governor in 2002—YouTube is flooded with his passionate
advocacy of abortion rights—he now presents himself as the most resolute
anti-abortion candidate in the Republican field. A Mormon, he sometimes adopts the
religious language of Evangelicals when he is addressing conservative Christian groups. To
economic conservatives, he pitches himself as the candidate most strongly committed to
slashing spending and taxes. (He’s the only major G.O.P. candidate to have signed a
formal anti-tax pledge, the sort of move that his spokesman dismissed as “government
by gimmickry” in Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign.) To national-security
conservatives, he is the most hawkish. (He says often that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
of Iran, should be indicted under the Genocide Convention, and his campaign has named the
former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black, the vice-chairman of Blackwater, as an
adviser.) But, while giving customers exactly what they want may be normal in the
corporate world, it can be costly in politics.
The weird thing is that having flip-flopped and pandered
a lot, Romney's campaign seems to feel almost liberated. At this point, it's not worth
worrying that any particular thing will earn their candidate a reputation as a liar, a
flip-flopper, and a panderer, because his stances on just a few high-profile issues show
very clearly that he is a liar, is a flip-flopper, and is a panderer. Thus, they can feel
free to pander and flip-flop on everything all the time. This is a stark contrast
to, say, Giuliani or McCain who want to try to both trim their sails on some issues, while
seeking credit for being straightforward and honest on others. Team Romney, though, always
knows that for their guy Expediency Conquers All.
For information on all individuals
and organizations listed in this website, or the name of a contact person in your area
that can give you further information on the Religious Freedom Coalition of the Southeast,
or the First Amendment Coalition, contact us at rfcse@hotmail.com
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Mitt Romney keeps his South
Carolina headquarters in a single-story building at one end of Gervais Street, which is
Columbia’s version of Washington’s K Street, lined with the offices of local
lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and other fixers and power brokers. The main room of Romney
HQ is decorated with hand-painted red-and-blue signs, mementos from previous campaign
events: mitt is my hero! mitt’s the man! mitt’s my pick! I visited on a steamy
Monday night in late July, a time of year when few South Carolinians are interested in
politics and fewer still want their evening interrupted by pitches for a presidential
primary six months away. But eleven volunteers, mostly college students, were hunched in
cubicles spread around the office, diligently placing cold calls to area residents. Boxes
of pepperoni pizza from Domino’s (a company Romney backed when he ran the investment
firm Bain Capital) were piled on a table against a wall. 
