Originally published in the Valley News on November 25, 2007
Romney Makes Sales Pitch
N.H. Front-Runner Was Steady at Business,
Evolving as Politician
By John P. Gregg — Valley News staff writer
Lebanon — At the end of an early September campaign forum at the Upper Valley Senior Center, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney worked the crowd with handshakes and how-are-yous and won a friendly greeting from Richard Holmes, a semi-retired utility company executive.
"We need more of a businessman than we do a politician as president," said Holmes, who plans to vote for the former Massachusetts governor in the New Hampshire primary and now has a Romney sign outside his Lebanon home.
"We need a fresh face, we need somebody who will actually take charge of a budget and really try to stick to a budget," Holmes told a reporter minutes later, "running the country like a business rather than someplace that has an infinite amount of money."
Romney, 60, forged his reputation as the straight-arrow venture capitalist and corporate consultant who rescued the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from scandal and budget woes. But in politics, he has been harder to pin down.
His statements about abortion have varied depending on the electorate he is wooing; he wrote about making equality for gays and lesbians a "mainstream concern" a decade before trying to ban gay marriage in Massachusetts; and it was not until this year that Romney, a fiscal hawk, signed a formal pledge not to raise taxes.
In short, Romney draws praise for his talents, but also questions about what he really stands for.
"I think that's a legitimate question," said William Mayer, a professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston and editor of The Making of the Presidential Candidates 2008.
Mayer said Romney, who last week was leading a University of New Hampshire Survey Center poll of likely GOP primary voters with 33 percent, thus far has run "far and away" the best campaign among Republican candidates and is a "very capable guy."
But, said Mayer, while "he's run a quite capable campaign, one thing I didn't think he did so well was explain why he's switched on these issues."
He has established a strong campaign team in New Hampshire, rounded out by the endorsement of U.S. Sen. Judd Gregg, the top Republican in the state.
On the campaign trail, where he is often accompanied by one of his five sons, Romney is an upbeat, animated campaigner. Romney's television advertising highlights his photogenic family — he and Ann Romney have been married for 38 years.
And the Romney family's wholesome image, complete with references to the 11th grandchild who arrived last week last week, also serves as a convenient topic when Romney is confronted with lingering questions from some voters about his Mormon faith.
What Romney is more comfortable discussing are his talents as a leader able to focus on a problem and find an innovative solution.
Talent and Innovation
Occupying the Corner Office in the Massachusetts Statehouse in January 2003, Romney recruited several prominent Democrats and independents into his administration, including Robert Pozen, the former vice chairman of Fidelity Investments who served for a year as Romney's secretary of economic affairs.
"From the point of view of economic policy and those areas I've dealt with him, he's a good decision-maker," said Pozen, a national heavyweight on Social Security policy and now the chairman of MFS Investment Management in Boston. "He wanted to understand the policies, he was very willing to debate the issues, and I think he was genuinely trying to find the right answers."
Another hire was Doug Foy, the longtime president of the Conservation Law Foundation, a leading New England environmental group.
Romney had never met Foy before winning election, but lured him to Beacon Hill by creating a new post, secretary of commonwealth development, and having Foy oversee environmental, housing, energy and transportation policy. By then, sprawl and affordable housing were major issues in eastern Massachusetts.
"You really can't have a sensible environmental policy in a state without dealing with energy or housing or transportation, so putting them together under one roof, which he did by fiat, was really a very striking, and I think important, structural change," said Foy, who worked in Romney's cabinet for more than three years.
In his lone, four-year term, Romney backed modernized — and much needed — zoning codes designed to protect the "New England village" feel of many downtowns; supported a $500 million "smart growth" housing measure to encourage compact development; invested heavily in transit and road-and-bridge maintenance; and even proposed a revenue-neutral automobile excise tax that would have penalized gas guzzlers and rewarded more fuel-efficient vehicles (the measure passed the Senate, but not the House, Foy said).
"I think he's always been most interested in the market and investment tools that you can bring to bear to solve environmental challenges, and he was certainly very interested in streamlining permitting processes, but it was never, in my experience, at the expense of the fundamental protection standards," Foy said.