Originally published in the Valley News on November 25, 2007
Romney Makes Sales Pitch
Romney also worked "word-by-word" on a climate action plan, Foy said, but declined to sign a regional greenhouse gas initiative embraced by other Northeast governors, including the rest of New England, and subsequently by Romney's successor in Massachusetts.
The initiative is designed to reduce carbon dioxide pollution through an emissions-trading system for power generators. Romney in 2005 declined to join the pact, saying it could increase costs for consumers.
Foy said the complicated pact came at "an awkward time" for Romney, who by then may have been considering a presidential bid, but Foy also added: "I think he does understand quite clearly the risk of climate change and the need to act."
Election Year Epiphanies?
Romney also clearly understands politics and packaging.
On taxes, Romney ran and established himself as a fiscal disciplinarian during his four years in office, working to close a $3 billion deficit he inherited in Massachusetts without raising taxes.
Romney balanced the budget in part by increasing fees that hadn't been raised in years. Despite his opposition to raising taxes while in office, he refused during his 2002 campaign to sign an anti-tax pledge important to some of his Massachusetts supporters. A campaign spokesman at the time even dismissed it as "government by gimmickry," according to The Boston Globe.
The day he left office last January, Romney signed an anti-tax pledge from Americans for Tax Reform, a Washington-based group influential in Republican politics. While some other Republican candidates, including Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, have signed the same pledge, neither Rudy Giuliani or John McCain has done so.
Romney's willingness to take the pledge has already paid off in New Hampshire primary skirmishing, winning him the endorsement of Orford resident Tom Thomson, an anti-tax crusader and son of the late Gov. Meldrim Thomson. Tom Thomson also sings the praises of Romney's "family values."
On abortion, Romney in 2002 reassured moderate Massachusetts voters that he posed no threat to abortion rights when he said, "On a personal basis, I don't favor abortion. ... However, as governor of the commonwealth, I will protect the right of a woman to choose under the laws of this country and the laws of the commonwealth."
But now, as a candidate for national office wooing the Republicans' conservative base, Romney has set a change of course, and places himself squarely to the right in the abortion debate.
"Over the years, I've given a great deal of thought to the issue of choice," Romney said back in February. "I believed it was time for us to show a greater degree of respect for human life. I'm 'pro-life,' and don't feel any reason to apologize for that."
Two years ago, a campaign strategist for Romney had spoken more bluntly to the National Review about the shift on a hot-button social issue.
"He's been a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly," Michael Murphy told the magazine. (Murphy later claimed his comment had been taken out of context; he is no longer working for Romney and is neutral in the race, having also worked previously for McCain).
Fairly or not, Romney's faith as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has been a persistent issue on the campaign trail, even though it was not a factor 40 years ago when his father, a former business executive who had become governor of Michigan, himself ran for president.
Mitt Romney, who filled leadership roles in his Boston-area church in the 1980s and early 1990s, often answers questions about religion by discussing his faith in Jesus Christ, then steers talk to family values.
"And if you want to learn something about my values, you can meet my wife and my son and you can see that we have American values like anyone else in this country," Romney said at a campaign forum in Iowa this summer, according to a Christian Science Monitor story on his faith.
Romney cast himself as a moderate healer during his first political bid, a spirited but unsuccessful campaign to unseat U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
In a letter to members of the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts in 1994, Romney suggested that as a centrist Republican, he would be better positioned than Kennedy, a liberal Democrat, to "make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern."
A decade later, however, when Romney as governor faced a Massachusetts state Supreme Court ruling that same-sex couples had the right to marry, he led an unsuccessful effort to pass a state constitutional amendment effectively banning gay marriage.
Home Is Where the Votes Are
Even on the issue of geography, Romney has kept a toe in more than one state.
He returned to his business career in Massachusetts after losing to Kennedy. Then, when the Salt Lake City's Olympics were mired in scandal over improper gifts to members of the International Olympics Committee and threatened with fiscal ruin, Romney moved to Utah in 1999 to become president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and helped rescue the games, aided by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal aid for infrastructure projects.
He appeared to be keeping his political options open for a run there — he had gone to Brigham Young University as an undergraduate — but returned to Massachusetts in 2002 and effectively pushed the unpopular Republican acting governor, Jane Swift, out of the race.
Despite the fiscal successes and development initiatives, Romney's four years as governor of Massachusetts got mixed reviews. Democrats who ruled Beacon Hill did little to advance his agenda, and Romney spent hours of his time and political capital on the gay marriage issue.
So, with geography apparently destiny — and Massachusetts hardly a popular state among the Republican base — Romney returned to old but familiar territory to formally announce his candidacy for governor in February.
He did so in Michigan, the state where he was born and raised, but where he had not lived in decades. Still, in Michigan, Romney is something of a household name.
His late father, George Romney, was the former chairman of American Motors Corp. and a popular three-term governor in Michigan in the 1960s, and had briefly sought the presidency himself in 1968.
"Michigan is of course the place where Ann and I were born and it is the place where we fell in love. Well, we still love each other, and we love Michigan," Romney said in his announcement speech, where he stood in front of an AMC Rambler, which his father brought to market. Romney said it and a nearby hybrid symbolized the type of innovation needed in government.
"He dubbed it a compact car, a car that would slay the gas-guzzling dinosaurs. And it transformed the industry," Mitt Romney said of the Rambler.
Focused and Ambitious
Romney, who graduated with highest honors from BYU and went on to earn both academic recognition and a master's in business administration and a law degree from Harvard, has repeatedly defended his evolution on issues, saying that good executives must change and improve their business or deserve to be fired.
At the Lebanon forum in September, he noted that the 1962 Rambler his sons had recently given him for his 60th birthday was considered an advanced, fuel-efficient car at the time, but had no seat belts or other basic features found today.
"In the private sector that I grew up in, you either change, or your competitor will change and put you out of business, and that's true almost throughout the private sector," said Romney, who amassed a fortune estimated at $350 million before leaving business for the Olympics.