The Real Romney (24 page)

Romney, often in open-collar shirts and slacks, was heavily engaged in day-to-day campaign operations, former staffers said, but he let people do the jobs for which he’d hired them. “He doesn’t sit in a campaign office and micromanage,” said Michael Sununu, who oversaw research and policy. That had also been his way at Bain: gather smart people, focus on the target, and let them go to work. Often the Romneys’ kitchen in Belmont, which opened up into a family room space, was a site for campaign meetings. Aides would spread their work out on the counters as the Romney boys ran into and out of the kitchen for food. “You kind of are immediately absorbed into this family atmosphere,” one former adviser recalled.

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n May 14, 1994, after several months of frenzied preparation, Romney faced his first political test. State Republican convention delegates gathered in a Springfield civic center to anoint a slate of candidates for that fall’s races. Romney’s game plan was to win big, knock out as many rivals as possible, and shred any doubt that he was the Republicans’ sole hope against Kennedy in November. The campaign ran its operations from a motor home parked in the belly of the convention hall. Inside the command center, for most of the day, were four people: Seth Weinroth; Weinroth’s assistant; and Romney’s parents, George and Lenore. “Here was this major political heavyweight who had been elected governor of Michigan, ran for president, and served in Nixon’s cabinet,” Weinroth said. “I was expecting that he would be there all day, telling me how to do my job.”

It was the opposite. Weinroth said George told him, “You’re the guy. You’re running the show. You just tell me what you need from me.” So Weinroth did, employing George to twist the arms of wavering delegates. He sent George, escorted by an aide or volunteer, onto the convention floor for surgical strikes, and the patriarch would make a forceful case for his son. On at least one occasion, his tactics backfired. Penny Reid, a Republican state committeewoman who was backing Lakian, was so offended by George’s pushiness that she told him she would work for Kennedy if his son won the nomination

But Weinroth’s convention strategy—from courting the delegates to distributing foam baseball gloves saying “I’m with Mitt”—worked. Romney cleaned up, winning 68 percent of the vote on the first ballot. Lakian, squeaking by with 16 percent, was the only other candidate to meet the threshold, setting up a September primary battle between the two. And the prize of winning the GOP nomination glistened brighter by the day:
The Boston Globe
published a poll that weekend suggesting that a majority of Massachusetts voters no longer felt that Kennedy deserved another term.

Romney used his convention speech to attack what he called the “failed big brother liberalism” of the thirty-two years Kennedy had been in office, highlighting increased crime and welfare dependency. “I will not embarrass you,” he told the crowd. “I will carry out with all my energies an attack, a resurgence of the principles you find dear.” Lakian, who vowed to press on, found encouragement from an unlikely source. After his speech, he was shaking hands when George Romney approached him. “He came out and said, ‘You gave the best convention speech, including my son,’ ” Lakian recalled. That evening, there was a private reception for staff nearby at a Sheraton. Romney had never been one to linger at parties, and this one was no different. As the staff, eager to blow off some steam after a grueling campaign stretch, celebrated over drinks, he made brief remarks, shook a few hands, and was gone.

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n paper, it was now Romney versus Lakian. In practice, the race between Romney and Kennedy was already well under way. Few doubted that Romney would win the Republican nomination. Some called on Lakian to drop out, which he refused to do. Instead he cast both Romney and Kennedy as children of privilege who could never understand the middle class. As the primary campaign unfolded, Lakian began to charge that Romney was more conservative than he was letting on, particularly on social issues, a hint of what would follow in the months ahead. It was the first time Romney had been pressed for his views on abortion, gay rights, guns, and other issues. “Ideologically, I’m not sure he knew where he was until he got into the campaign,” Lakian said. “I think he was filling in the blanks as to what he did believe in.”

When Michael Sununu, the campaign’s research and policy guru, would sit down with Romney and talk through key issues like welfare reform, Romney, true to his Bain training, wanted to drill down into the details: Who supports this? Are there other alternatives? What does the national Republican leadership say about it? Less natural to him was the question “What do I think?” “There were a number of issues that were put before us that we responded to that I hadn’t really given a lot of thought to,” he recalled. He did his best to keep his focus on Kennedy. In August, the campaign distributed a slick videotape to voters, in which Romney, dressed in a blue-and-white-plaid shirt and addressing the camera directly, celebrated what he called “a real opportunity in Massachusetts to replace one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate.” He urged people to show support for his campaign by dialing 1-800-TEDS-OUT.

Kennedy and his advisers, meanwhile, were furiously trying to ramp up a moribund campaign apparatus. They launched a registration drive targeting minority voters. They prepared an unusual summer ad blitz to repair Kennedy’s image and remind voters of his accomplishments in the Senate. They hired additional advisers and even contracted with a Washington investigative firm to probe Romney’s background. One former Kennedy aide described a summer gathering of Kennedy’s statewide political organization in a ballroom in Hyannis, near the Kennedys’ Cape Cod compound. It looked to the aide more like a Bingo convention. “I’m looking out over this crowd of six hundred or seven hundred people, and they’re basically geriatrics,” the aide said. “I remember thinking ‘This is what happens when you’re a senator and you really don’t have a campaign, and you get reelected automatically every six years.’ ” That, the aide said, “was the point where I was most worried.”

It only got worse. As Labor Day came and went, polls began showing Romney just behind Kennedy, then pulling even with him, thanks in part to an effective TV ad Romney aired challenging Kennedy’s record on crime. With this Republican upstart suddenly level with Ted Kennedy, the race drew national, even international, attention. Kennedy and his advisers acted as if all this was to be expected—“polls do go up and down,” Michael Kennedy, the senator’s nephew and campaign manager, said at one point—but they were rattled. On September 20, Romney crushed Lakian in the Republican primary, fueling his momentum. Appearing before some five hundred supporters at the Sheraton Boston, Romney, flanked by Ann, their five sons, and his mother and father, cast himself as an agent of change, saying, “Now we ignite the final stage of this rocket, and the next stop is going to be the U.S. Senate.” It was, for the Romney team, the high-water mark. “I remember the feeling,” one former aide said, recalling the buzz among the staff, the volunteers, and the supporters. “It was a great night.”

Romney said he told colleagues when he first joined the race that he thought his chance of winning was about one in twenty, although Ann was more optimistic. Charles Manning, according to Romney’s account, was more blunt. “There’s just no way you can win,” Romney said Manning told him early on. Now, with the primary behind him, the wind at his back, and Kennedy seemingly on the run, Romney had changed his assessment. This was the race he’d wanted. New face against old. Change versus clout. And he liked his prospects. “After the primary,” Romney recalled, “I began to think, ‘Wow . . . I’m sort of catching on here. Maybe I could actually win this thing.’ ”

If Romney was beaming from behind the podium on primary night, the smile slipped from his face the moment he descended the stage. A TV reporter, nudged by the Kennedy camp, immediately challenged Romney on his record at Bain. Hadn’t the firm slashed some jobs? “You saw the flash of anger,” said one former Kennedy aide, describing Romney’s reaction. It was something of an epiphany for the Democratic campaign: Romney seemed to have a glass jaw. “I walked in to Michael Kennedy and said, ‘All we have to do is keep the pressure on this guy, and we can beat him.’ ” It was the first strike in what would become the Kennedy team’s principal method of halting Romney’s ascent: tagging him as a corporate raider who had made millions at workers’ expense. For Romney, who claimed credit for having helped create some ten thousand jobs, the line of attack hit where it hurt. It was a soft spot he would never effectively address. “We didn’t want to let him take a deep breath,” the former Kennedy aide said.

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wo days before the GOP primary, Kennedy; his wife, Vicki; and his top political advisers gathered at his Back Bay condominium for a Sunday-night strategy session. The mood was tense. Kennedy pollster Tom Kiley presented his newest numbers, which confirmed Romney’s surge. The race was deadlocked. The room overflowed with aggressive personalities who clashed over what to do, while Kennedy ate from a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken that a maid brought him. “It was one of the most sort of strange 1960s French film–type moments, where you can’t believe what’s going on around you,” recalled one adviser who was present. Kennedy agreed that they would have to raise and spend a lot more money than they initially planned. He knew his field organization would have to be rebuilt, and fast. Robert Shrum, one of Kennedy’s closest advisers, read scripts from TV ads he had produced, which portrayed Romney as a heartless businessman. Shrum recommended that they begin airing the spots immediately. Kennedy was uncomfortable going negative on Romney, a campaign tactic he had never before been forced to use. But he was persuaded by the gravity of the situation, by the fact that Romney had been attacking him, and by Vicki, who understood the political trouble her new husband was in. Vicki’s message was “This is real.” So Kennedy signed off. They would go after Romney, and hard.

For months, Kennedy researchers had been quietly mining Romney’s business record for political vulnerabilities. One recent deal caught their eye. A company called Ampad Corporation, which Romney’s firm, Bain Capital, had acquired in 1992, had just purchased a paper products plant in Marion, Indiana, from SCM Office Supplies. The day Ampad bought the factory, SCM fired the workers. Many were rehired, but at lesser wages and reduced benefits. The notice that workers received upon returning from their July Fourth weekend made clear that the layoffs were integral to the deal. It read, “The assets of SCM Office Supplies Inc. are being sold to Ampad Corporation. Therefore as of 3:00 p.m. today . . . your employment will end.”

Having taken a leave of absence from Bain six months earlier, Romney was not directly involved in the firings. But it was still his company. One former Bain executive who sat on Ampad’s board later said that Romney had the authority to resolve the dispute but instead let Bain managers focus on maximizing the company’s investment. Romney was a private-equity man and a coolly brilliant one; he was not yet thinking as a candidate. The story was political gold for the Kennedy campaign, neatly aligning with its overarching goal of casting Romney as a self-interested capitalist. “It was devastating,” said one former Kennedy staffer. But aides to Kennedy, thinking the senator would look weak coming out so aggressively against a comparative unknown, were leery of letting on about their involvement. So they encouraged the notion that the gift had fallen into their laps.

On September 1, 266 members of the United Paperworkers International Union went on strike at the plant to protest the deal. A union official called Kennedy’s campaign, which arranged for the union to tell the Indiana press about the Romney connection, allowing Kennedy aides to suggest that the story had broken independently. In the meantime, the Kennedy team was making big plans. On September 26, the campaign sent a crew to Indiana to film the workers for TV ads. Tad Devine, a partner of Shrum, went to Marion with a script for the workers to read on camera. But Devine quickly scrapped it when he realized how much better the workers’ own words were. Kennedy’s campaign tested those and other spots with a focus group. The ads featuring the Ampad workers were the clear winners.

Three days after the filming, on September 29, Kennedy went up with a series of six thirty-second TV spots featuring nine Ampad workers. They were withering. The workers—angry, plagued by economic uncertainty, and as authentic-sounding as they come—were more than happy to lay the blame at Romney’s feet. “He has cut our wages to put money in his pocket,” one worker said. Another, Sharon Alter, a packer who had been laid off after twenty-nine years with the firm, said, “I would like to say to Mitt Romney, ‘If you think you’d make such a good senator, come out here to Marion, Indiana, and see what your company has done to these people.’ ” Robert White, a fellow Bain executive who had joined Romney’s campaign for the general-election push, complained that the firm had invested in dozens of companies, the vast majority of which had been successful. “Wouldn’t it be nice if Kennedy would run some ads about the forty success stories instead of the handful that weren’t?” But White was no expert in politics. As Tad Devine said in defending the Ampad spots, “I don’t think we are under an obligation to tell Mitt Romney’s side of the story.”

As the TV onslaught continued, the Romney campaign was caught flat-footed. At first, Romney justified layoffs as sometimes being necessary to revive a business. “This is not fantasy land,” he said. “This is the real world. And in the real world, there is nothing wrong with companies trying to compete, trying to stay alive, trying to make money.” Romney’s pollster Linda DiVall started noticing that the Ampad ads were hurting, because voters, in open-ended questions, began describing Romney as coldhearted. Still, his favorability rating remained high, so the campaign didn’t panic. Romney did not air a TV ad giving his side of the story. Instead his campaign tried to change the subject, airing a spot criticizing Kennedy over his opposition to the death penalty. The paperworkers’ union then doubled down, sending a group of striking workers to Massachusetts as a “truth squad” to hound Romney on his home turf. They distributed leaflets blasting Bain and depicting Romney dressed as an executioner. On October 7, with reporters and cameras on hand to capture it all, strikers and local union officials got into an angry confrontation with Romney strategist Charles Manning outside Bain headquarters, shouting “union buster” as a deal to meet with Romney fell through. Two days later, the workers confronted Romney at the start of a Columbus Day parade. “I’d love to help and I’ll do my best,” Romney told them. “But there’s a separate management team running the company Ampad. I don’t work there.” One worker fired back, “I don’t anymore, either.” That night, Romney sat down with the workers at a hotel in suburban Newton to try to persuade them that the layoffs weren’t his fault.