The Real Romney (23 page)

F
or fifteen years, Romney had been in the business of creative destruction and wealth creation. But what about his claims of job creation? Though Bain Capital surely helped expand some companies that had created jobs, the layoffs and closures at other firms would lead Romney’s political opponents to say that he had amassed a fortune in part by putting people out of work. The lucrative deals that made Romney wealthy could exact a cost. Maximizing financial return to investors could mean slashing jobs, closing plants, and moving production overseas. It could also mean clashing with union workers, serving on a board of a company that ran afoul of federal laws (as in the Damon case), and loading up already struggling companies with debt.

There is a difference between companies run by buyout firms and those rooted in their communities, according to Ross Gittell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire’s Whittemore School of Business and Economics. When it comes to buyout firms, he said, “The objective is: make money for investors. It’s not to maximize jobs.” Romney, in fact, had a fiduciary duty to investors to make as much money as possible. Sometimes everything worked out perfectly; a change in strategy might lead to cost savings and higher profits, and Bain cashed in. Sometimes jobs were lost, and Bain cashed in or lost part or all of its investment. In the end, Romney’s winners outweighed his losers on the Bain balance sheet. Marc Wolpow, a former Bain partner who worked with Romney on many deals, said the discussion at buyout companies typically does not focus on whether jobs will be created. “It’s the opposite, what jobs we can cut,” Wolpow said, “because you had to document how you were going to create value. Eliminating redundancy, or the elimination of people, is a very valid way. Businesses will die if you don’t do that. I think the way Mitt should explain it is, if we didn’t buy these businesses and impose efficiencies on them, the market would have done it with disastrous consequences.”

Romney has stood by his assertion that he helped create a “net, net” of tens of thousands of jobs, and Bain Capital officials said in 2011 that his claim is accurate. However, neither Romney nor Bain provided documentation of that claim. Nor is the claim something that can be verified independently with anything approaching certainty. Many companies that Romney held briefly were in private hands and changed owners numerous times. They were saddled with debt, restructured, and split up. Some companies under Romney’s control prospered, and some failed; some produced new jobs, and others shut down and left people out of work. It is possible that many of the companies in which Romney invested might otherwise have gone out of business entirely.

The best example of Romney’s turnaround skills came when he saved his old firm, Bain & Company. In that case, 260 people were laid off, salaries and benefits were cut, and a painful restructuring plan was put into place. But without Romney’s work, the entire enterprise might have sunk, taking Bain Capital with it. In the long run, Romney enabled Bain & Company and Bain Capital to grow—and that is Romney at his best, using the power of “creative destruction” to cut some jobs and eventually create new ones. Without those hard decisions, Romney’s own job might not have survived, and he very likely would not have had a future in politics. “The goal of the investor in Bain Capital is to make absolute returns,” said Howard Anderson, the MIT professor who has also been a Bain investor. “When they do well, Bain does well. When Bain does well, they do well. It is essentially capitalism at its finest—and its worst.”

R
omney was nine years into his fifteen-year career at Bain Capital when he began having thoughts that he would later describe as “irrational” but that in retrospect seem wholly predictable. It was 1993, and he was feeling both fulfilled and restless. He had earned huge sums—but not yet the hundreds of millions of dollars that later deals would bring—and seemed ready for something new. Everyone who knew Mitt well, from his fellow missionaries to his college classmates to his business partners, knew that he seemed to have his heart set on someday moving from business to politics. The only question was when.

He minutely analyzed his options, as always. The numbers looked good; his tally of accomplishments was impressive. But still something seemed missing. What he had achieved to date seemed to him more a means than an end. There had always been another goal held in reserve, one he had carefully safeguarded through the years. At many stages of his life, he had confided to colleagues: I need to be careful about this; I might run for public office one day. The thought was always there. Now he talked it over with Ann and then with his father, the author of his life’s ambitions. In deciding when to exit the business of making money, George Romney’s example was vivid. Mitt often recalled how his father had “walked away from success” and run for governor of Michigan. His father’s business experience had been as pure as it got; George took over a failing company, stayed long enough to set it on a course for success, and left on his own terms. As Mitt later wrote, “Work was never just a way to make a buck to my dad. There was a calling and purpose to it. It was about making life better for people.”

And so, in the security of his boardroom at Copley Place or at his family manse in Belmont, Romney kept asking himself “Do I really want to stay at Bain Capital for the rest of my life? Do I want to make it even more successful, make even more money? Why?” The answer, when it came, made his choice seem obvious: “I thought of my dad,” he said. He would follow the family standard and enter the world of public service. And, like his father, he had it in mind to start near the top rung. Indeed, he had a big target in mind, with huge risks and also huge potential. Victory could put bring him national notice and put him on the path to the White House, the path on which George Romney had stumbled badly; defeat—well, it was too soon to think about that.

[ Seven ]

Taking On an Icon

I was getting ready for this guy that was going to be kind of a doddering old fool. I’d be able to crush him like a grape.

—MITT ROMNEY ON TED KENNEDY

H
e came from Welsh coal-mining stock and built his own American dream: a job at General Motors; a successful engineering firm hatched in his basement; three children who found a spiritual home within the Mormon church; and a bevy of grandkids who knew him as “Pops.” But those were better days. Edward Roderick Davies, in his midseventies and living with his daughter and son-in-law, Ann and Mitt Romney, was now fighting a losing battle with prostate cancer. One afternoon in the early 1990s, as Ann was putting dishes away in their kitchen, he turned grave. “I’m so mad that I’m dying,” he said.

Davies wasn’t looking for pity. Decades earlier, his own father, having nearly been killed by a runaway coal cart, had brought his family from South Wales to the United States in search of something better. Now confronting his own mortality, Davies wanted his daughter to make the most of the opportunities she and her husband had been given. “He said, ‘Ann, you’ve got so much living to do. Think of the exciting things that will happen in the world. I’m so jealous of all the wonders you’re going to see in your lifetime,’ ” Ann later recalled.

Edward Davies died not long after. But his words stuck. Ann suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of looking back over her life with regret. Losing both her parents within a year had sparked a slew of existential questions: “Who am I? What am I doing? And what’s life about?” The conversation with her father still resonated in 1993, when Mitt and Ann began talking about taking on Edward M. Kennedy in the upcoming Senate race. Mitt resented Kennedy’s rakish behavior and rejected his liberal ideas. “I’ve been living here for twenty-three years, and I’ve been saying, ‘Somebody ought to go after that guy,’ ” he later told a group of business leaders. Besides, Kennedy had been in the Senate since 1962, when Mitt was a geeky fifteen-year-old. Ann remembered thinking, “Are we going to die some day and then say, ‘Mitt, you never did it? You never tried?’ ”

So she brought it up as they were lying in bed one morning that summer, as Ann and Mitt tell it. They’d been blessed, Ann told her husband, and now they should share that blessing. Invoking his family’s political legacy, Ann told Mitt it was time he took on Kennedy himself. “You can gripe and gripe and gripe all you want about how upset you are about the direction the country’s going,” she recalled telling him. “But if you don’t stand up and do something about it, then, you know, shut up and stop bothering me.” Mitt pulled the covers over his head. “No! No! I don’t want to do it,” he said. “I just about fell out of bed,” he would say later. But he couldn’t deny that she had a point. He was, at forty-six, firmly established in his business career and contented with his life at home and church. He seemed to have it all. But that just left him with a question: what was left to do? So following a period of reflection, polling, and soundings with influential Republicans, Romney convinced himself that his wife was right. That October, after they secluded themselves, fasted, and prayed, Ann and Mitt Romney made up their minds: he would launch a campaign to oust Ted Kennedy, one of the United States’ great liberal fixtures, from the U.S. Senate.

I
t was a bold proposition. This was Massachusetts, where Democrats reigned and the Kennedys were royalty. Over more than three decades in Washington, Ted Kennedy had established himself as one of the preeminent voices on the left, a champion of civil rights, education, health care, and the working class. And he was a political titan: no opponent had ever given him a serious scare. By 1994, however, the political climate had turned, and not in his favor. Around the country, voters had grown weary of incumbents. Republicans had begun, after years of political near irrelevance, to prove they could win in Massachusetts. And Kennedy himself had just emerged from a period of reckless personal behavior, further eroding his public standing.

In the decade between his divorce from Joan Kennedy in 1982 and his second marriage, to Victoria Reggie, in July 1992, Kennedy’s reputation for womanizing, drinking, and partying had become the stuff of lore—and the shadow of Chappaquiddick still fell over his head. It surely didn’t help his image with voters that in 1991, he had taken his younger son, Patrick, and a nephew, William Kennedy Smith, to a bar in Palm Beach, Florida, and that Smith had been charged with raping a woman he’d brought back to the Kennedy estate. Smith was later acquitted, but for Kennedy, whose testimony at the trial was nationally televised, it was a low point. He took criticism even from friends and friendly media. His efficacy in the Senate was diminished, which was especially evident during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. Kennedy, usually a forceful presence, played only a secondary role. Ultimately, he was forced to turn a planned speech at Harvard University into a public apology, a promise to mend his ways. “I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life,” Kennedy said. “I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.” All in all, it was hardly the profile of a man invulnerable to political challenge.

Early internal polls confirmed a growing fear inside the Kennedy camp: “Kennedy fatigue” had set in. Many Massachusetts voters viewed him unfavorably. “There was, from the beginning, a sense of urgency about the campaign that had nothing to do with who was on the other side,” said one former Kennedy staffer. “It was dangerous territory.” Nor did Kennedy, who was going on sixty-two, look or sound especially good. He had gained weight. His face was mottled. He spoke with labored breaths. “People said to me, ‘You know, he’s getting older, he’s over the hill. He’s not coherent anymore,’ ” Romney recalled. “I was getting ready for this guy that was going to be kind of a doddering old fool. I’d be able to crush him like a grape.”

In Romney, Republicans had found a perfect foil for Kennedy—in appearance, worldview, background, and lifestyle. He was a fit, upstanding Mormon with thick, winning hair and an unassailable home life. He was brainy, well spoken, and enormously successful. All the ingredients seemed to be in place. And with Kennedy faltering, it seemed just the right moment. “This,” Romney would later say, “is the chance of a lifetime.” But first Romney had a lot of questions to answer. It would be his first foray into politics, after all, the first time, really, that he’d been forced to ponder what he stood for outside business, family, and faith. What were his issues? What did he believe? Sure, he was against Kennedy, but what was he for? In other words, who was Mitt Romney?

H
e was, technically speaking, a first-time candidate. But he entered the political arena with a seasoned self-confidence, a legacy of his parents. He’d learned something of politics at the feet of his father and watched his mother, Lenore, wage her unsuccessful U.S. Senate bid in 1970. For the Romneys, as for the Kennedys, public service seemed to be almost a prewritten chapter. And like the Kennedys, the Romneys had the money to enter the fray at an immediate financial advantage. Young Mitt had absorbed many lessons at his parents’ side. He knew the arc of a campaign. He knew the importance of communicating a clear message and the pitfalls of straying from it. He knew the loss of privacy that came with public life and that he must be wary of the press—whose questions and scrutiny had helped bring his father’s presidential hopes crashing down. “He knew what the game was,” said one veteran Massachusetts GOP operative. What he didn’t know much about was the state Republican electorate, whose support he would need—and quickly—to fend off primary challengers and build toward a showdown with Kennedy in the fall. He knew almost none of the key players, but it was, as it happened, a fortuitous time to be a fresh Republican face. After a long political winter, the Massachusetts GOP was on the rebound, in large part because of William F. Weld, who, campaigning as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, had captured the governor’s office in 1990. Weld had modernized the traditional, moderate mold of Massachusetts Republicanism, and the formula seemed to hold great promise.

Even before all that, state Republican leaders, desperate to rebuild the party behind new names, had tried to recruit Romney into politics. “You ought to consider running for office—we could use a guy like you,” Joseph D. Malone, then the executive director of the Massachusetts Republican Party, said he told Romney over lunch in the late 1980s. “You’d be a perfect fit for a run for governor or U.S. senator.” Romney just chuckled and said, “Someday.” So he stayed in the background, sending occasional checks and showing up at fund-raisers. He didn’t even join the Republican Party until October 1993, switching his registration from unenrolled in preparation for his Senate run. He had given money to Democratic congressional candidates and had voted for Paul Tsongas, the iconoclastic liberal, in the 1992 Democratic presidential primary. He was, the veteran Republican operative said, “a very attractive unknown quantity.”

Romney’s enigmatic political identity would become a liability as he got deeper into the race. Some of his positions seemed to be calibrated for voter approval, not necessarily reflective of personal convictions. Strategy trumped ideology: what kind of candidate did he need to be to win? One conservative columnist complained that Romney was simply “philosophically vacuous.” Over the top as that assessment may have been, it was indicative of Romney’s challenge, even among those who should have been his natural allies. One thing, however, was clear from the beginning: change was the campaign’s watchword, the theme around it they would build everything else. Kennedy, Romney felt, had simply lost touch with Massachusetts. “That was his entire focus,” said Seth Weinroth, a lawyer whom Romney tapped to run his state convention effort.

Romney opened his campaign headquarters near Fresh Pond in North Cambridge, a short drive from his Belmont home. As in most campaigns, factions developed; there were the Washington consultants who handled TV ads; the local team led by the chief strategist, Charles Manning, and campaign manager Robert Marsh; the family and friends who volunteered; the fund-raising team; and some of his colleagues from Bain. At least in the beginning, they worked in concert. The team staged a campaign kickoff at the Copley Plaza in February 1994. Romney promised two hundred supporters that he would go to Washington and “tame the monster” of government, saying, “It’s time to come home, Ted.”

H
is bravado masked the practical concerns that lay ahead. Romney needed the support of the Republican rank and file—many of whom wouldn’t have been able to pick him out of a police lineup—to get past his GOP competitors, including John Lakian, a businessman and unsuccessful candidate for governor in 1982. Early in 1994, Lakian and Romney had lunch in downtown Boston at what is now the Langham Hotel. Romney urged him to drop his Senate bid and run instead for the House against Gerry Studds, a Democrat from the South Shore. Romney’s rationale was that Kennedy would be hard enough to beat without having to weather a primary battle. Lakian thought about it but called Romney a few days later and told him no. Romney also had to win the backing of at least 15 percent of the delegates at the spring state Republican convention to qualify for the primary ballot in September. So the Romneys set out for Republican meetings and caucuses across the state, splitting up to woo delegates from different regions on the same night. Mitt would go to one town, while Ann, George, and Mitt’s eldest son, Tagg, then twenty-four and just finished with his degree at Brigham Young University, would each represent the campaign in others. “We knew nobody,” Ann said later. “We did not know a single Republican activist.” George, who was eighty-six, was a particularly popular attraction, given his political résumé and reputation for brash honesty.

The campaign’s media team, Greg Stevens and Rick Reed, meanwhile, was putting together Romney’s first TV ad, a sixty-second biographical spot designed to introduce him to voters. In it, Romney earnestly described how he and Ann, with Tagg as a baby, had first come east on the Massachusetts Turnpike in a Ryder truck, deciding to make a life there. The early spots worked. “He just made great strides. The more he was known, the better he did,” Reed said. Romney was also proving that he could raise money, above and beyond whatever contributions he might make from his own bank account. His fund-raising success helped establish him as the GOP front-runner. The campaign organized a team of lawyers to carefully vet each contribution, to avoid accepting checks from unsavory donors.

In those early days, Romney was getting a rousing reception, and his team was in high spirits. He was David, cheered on for having the temerity to go after the lurching Goliath, and that aroused a kind of underdog spirit. “Clearly everybody understood that this was the tallest order and the most daunting challenge in American politics at the time,” Weinroth said. Inside the campaign, the mood was serious but playful and informal. At headquarters, family and friends mixed easily with staff. They ordered so often from a nearby Domino’s that pizza boxes littered the place. “To this day,” a former staffer said, “I don’t think I can eat Domino’s pizza.”

Ann assumed the role of den mother, supplying the troops with M&Ms, popcorn, and cookies; making sure the office was stocked with supplies; and coordinating volunteers. “She was looking out over everybody,” said one former aide. Ann also expanded her role as a sounding board for her husband, speaking out when a phrase or message didn’t sound right or a piece of clothing was unflattering—“Don’t wear that shirt,” she’d say. And she could dish out prickly retorts. After Janet Jeghelian, a former talk-show host and one of Romney’s GOP rivals, called Romney an “empty suit,” Ann fired back, “How would she know? When’s the last time she checked?”