The Real Romney (34 page)

T
he resounding defeat spurred a resolution. “From now on,” Romney said, “it’s me, me, me.” It was not long after the disappointing verdict at the polls, and the shift in Romney’s mind-set was evident. No longer, he told the
Boston Globe
editorial board, would he spend so much time trying to build the Republican Party in Massachusetts. “The whole climate changed,” Robert Travaglini said. “I think that’s when they started looking elsewhere.”

Even before the 2004 elections, Romney had been working to expand his national profile. That September, he earned a prime-time speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in New York, ripping into Kerry as a weather vane who went whatever way the wind blew. And he became an out-of-state surrogate for President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign. Romney and his aides brushed aside questions about his long-term intentions, but an October appearance for Bush in Iowa ratcheted up the chatter. Romney, in fact, had been working quietly for months to build the scaffolding of a presidential campaign. In the summer of 2003, barely six months into his governorship, his old friend and confidant Robert White had huddled in Washington with two political strategists, Michael Murphy and Trent Wisecup, and a top GOP lawyer, Benjamin Ginsberg, to ponder Romney’s next move. At Ginsberg’s law office near Georgetown and later, over steak in a private room at Morton’s, the seeds of Romney’s eventual presidential campaign were planted. They conceived the Commonwealth PAC, a political action committee that would enable Romney to build a staff and travel the country with checkbook in hand, currying favor with Republican leaders by contributing to their campaigns and causes. Romney’s advisers organized the PAC in an innovative way, setting up affiliates in six key states—including some states with no limits on contributions, which allowed Romney’s wealthy associates, notably several Bain partners, to give five- and six-figure sums. The PAC went on to raise at least $8.8 million and dole out $1.3 million, much of it in key presidential-primary states.

He also put himself onto the leadership ladder of the Republican Governors Association, with the aim of becoming chairman in 2006. The move was designed to give him visibility, contact with Republican donors, and the chance to visit other states, and it worked. Romney’s statehouse staff, meanwhile, began collecting biographical information to answer media inquiries about Romney’s background, including his Michigan draft board records from the 1960s. “I didn’t know if I wanted to run, I didn’t know what would happen, I didn’t know who the opposition would be,” Romney said of those early preparations. “But I knew I didn’t want to foreclose the possibility.” That, according to a Republican close to Romney, had been the advice of Robert Bennett, then a Republican senator from Utah, whose family had long known Romney’s. Timing was everything in politics, Bennett told Romney. If he thought he might want to run, he had to start now.

Romney’s furious preparations for a possible campaign sparked controversy in October 2006, when
The Boston Globe
reported that his political team had privately consulted with Mormon church leaders on building a nationwide network of Mormon supporters. E-mails showed that Romney’s political operatives, family members, and church officials had discussed building a grassroots political organization using alumni chapters of Brigham Young University’s business school around the country. Representatives of BYU, which is run by the church, and Romney’s political action committee had also begun soliciting help from prominent Mormons, including a well-known author suggested by Romney himself, to build the program, which his advisers had dubbed Mutual Values and Priorities, or MVP.

The e-mails also indicated that Jeffrey R. Holland, one of the twelve apostles who help run the worldwide church, was handling the initiative for the Mormon leadership and had hosted a September 19, 2006, meeting about it in his church office in Salt Lake City with Josh Romney, Mitt’s middle son; Don Stirling, a consultant for Romney’s Commonwealth PAC; and Kem Gardner, Romney’s friend who had helped recruit him to the Olympics. Holland, a former BYU president, suggested using the BYU Management Society, an alumni and networking organization of the university’s business school, to build the supporter base, the e-mails indicated. Romney would then have an established infrastructure—the group at the time had 5,500 members in about forty U.S. chapters—to help raise money and provide political support.

Romney’s team downplayed the MVP program and chalked it up to overzealous advisers and supporters. Stirling and Gardner took the blame. The risk for the church was running afoul of federal laws prohibiting political advocacy by tax-exempt organizations. For Romney, the risks were political, as Gardner acknowledged in an interview with
The
Salt Lake Tribune
. “We know Mitt can’t use the church,” he said. “Nobody wants a Mormon presidential campaign. It would kill us with the evangelical groups.”

Gradually, Romney drifted further away from his day job, traveling almost constantly to promote himself and the Republican Party—a tally at the end of 2006 found that he’d been out of Massachusetts more than 200 days that year. Ann Romney, who had maintained a very low profile as Massachusetts’s first lady, began expanding her own visibility on the national campaign trail, helping establish her husband’s sterling reputation as a husband and father. The same could not be said for several of Romney’s competitors in the Republican presidential primary. All the while, Romney was doing far more to prepare for a possible presidential bid than raise money and network with party leaders. Indeed, none of that would mean anything if he couldn’t sell himself to primary voters in states where people knew little about him. And so Romney, employing the same careful, methodical strategy that had served him so well in the past, set out to build a new political identity.

O
n November 9, 2004, a week after his bid to elect more Republicans failed, Mitt Romney and two aides met in his statehouse office with a renowned Harvard University stem cell researcher named Douglas A. Melton. In Romney’s retelling, Melton coolly explained how his work relied on cloning human embryos. “He said, ‘Look, you don’t have to think about this stem cell research as a moral issue, because we kill the embryos after fourteen days,’ ” Romney would later say. Melton afterward vigorously denied Romney’s characterization of the meeting, saying, “We didn’t discuss killing or anything related to it.” Melton said, “I explained my work to him, told him about my deeply held respect for life, and explained that my work focuses on improving the lives of those suffering from debilitating diseases.”

But for Romney, it was a seminal day, triggering what he describes as an awakening on “life” issues after he had spent his entire political career espousing very different views. In the official account of Romney’s rebirth as a social conservative, the meeting with Melton would become the Genesis story. On February 10, 2005, three months after his meeting, Romney came out strongly against the cloning technique, saying in a
New York Times
interview that the method breached an “ethical boundary.” He vowed to press for legislation to criminalize the work. Romney’s opposition stunned scientists, lawmakers, and observers because of his past statements endorsing, at least in general terms, embryonic stem cell research. Six months earlier, his wife, Ann, had publicly expressed hope that stem cells would hold a cure for her multiple sclerosis.

Some scientists wondered if he simply didn’t fully understand stem cell research. So they held a meeting with his deputy chief of staff, Peter Flaherty. In that meeting, Flaherty made clear that they knew the issue cold, Leonard Zon, a stem cell scientist at Children’s Hospital in Boston who participated, said later. “I felt that they had thought this through and that their reasons for making this decision either was that he was a true believer or that there were other things going on politically,” Zon remarked. Many critics accused Romney of political expedience. “There’s evidence that he is clearly concerned with the national agenda,” Robert Travaglini, who led efforts to pass a stem cell bill over Romney’s objections, said at the time.

Romney has rejected suggestions that politics motivated his change of heart. “Changing my position was in line with an ongoing struggle that anyone has that is opposed to abortion personally, vehemently opposed to it, and yet says, ‘Well, I’ll let other people make that decision,’ ” he said. “And you say to yourself, ‘But if you believe that you’re taking innocent life, it’s hard to justify letting other people make that decision.’

“You know, everybody’s entitled to their own view,” he continued. “I think there’s some people who look at the issue of the beginning of life from the lens of their faith, of their religion, and say, ‘When does the spirit enter the body?’ That is not the lens that I think a secular leader should use. I look at this from a scientific standpoint. And I don’t know when the spirit enters the body or the soul enters the body, and that’s not something I would endeavor to find out.” Romney said he arrived at his moral answer after pressing scientists on the cloning process. “When you create this clone, when you take the skin cell or the nucleus of a skin cell of a male and put it in an egg of the female, do you at that point have life?” Romney recalled asking. “And they said, ‘No question, it is life. Once you put those together, you have life.’ . . . That’s all I need to know for when the definition of when human life begins.”

For all the deep reflection Romney said he had engaged in, he was also acutely aware of the political significance his newfound views held. He turned Harvard into a useful foil on the conservative circuit, boasting in one fund-raising letter of his valiant fight against the liberal establishment over what he termed “human cloning.”

The extent of Romney’s shift became clearer in July 2005, when he wrote an op-ed in
The Boston Globe
saying that on abortion, his “convictions have evolved and deepened during my time as governor.” He began calling himself “firmly prolife.” On that basis, he had vetoed—and returned from a New Hampshire vacation to do it—a bill to make the so-called morning-after pill available over the counter at Massachusetts pharmacies and to require hospitals to make it available to rape victims. Supporters of the bill noted that the pill was categorized as a contraceptive, because it halted ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterine wall but had no effect on a firmly implanted egg. But Romney said he believed it could function as “an abortion pill.” Romney’s veto, which the legislature eventually overrode, drew condemnation from reproductive rights advocates, who remembered that Romney, only three years earlier, had answered “yes” to a question on their questionnaire about whether he supported expanding access to emergency contraception. By 2006, Romney’s aides were telling the national political press that he would have signed a controversial bill in South Dakota that outlawed abortion even in cases of rape or incest but then sought those exceptions through separate legislation.

As his term went on, Romney would make a series of shifts—in some cases wholesale reversals of past positions, in others significant changes in emphasis—on issues that had nothing to do with abortion or the question of when life begins. It was a sweeping recalibration that erased any doubt that he had set his sights on a bigger prize than Massachusetts. What made that possible was partly his gift for salesmanship. “He can come to a position or realization that’s newly found and go out there an hour later and convey it with great zeal,” one former adviser said. “A lot of candidates couldn’t pull that off.” After saying he opposed abstinence-only education, Romney adopted just such a program for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds, primarily in Hispanic and black communities. He backed out of a multistate plan to reduce greenhouse gases which Massachusetts had helped craft—and for which he had earlier voiced support. And perhaps most striking of all, he adopted a wholly new tone on gay rights, a break that produced a deep sense of betrayal among those who had taken him at his word for the previous ten years.

T
he decision, on November 18, 2003, hit like a lightning bolt. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, one of the nation’s oldest appellate courts, had legalized same-sex marriage in a close ruling, making Massachusetts the first state where gays and lesbians could legally marry. Suddenly Massachusetts was on the vanguard of a burning civil rights issue. And its governor, Mitt Romney, who had already been pondering a national political career, was on the hot seat.

This was the man who had promised in 1994 to be more effective than Ted Kennedy at reaching “full equality” for gays and lesbians. He had never supported gay marriage, but at one point in 1994 he hadn’t ruled it out, either. He had also said it should be left up to states to decide whether to sanction same-sex marriage and had criticized Republican “extremists” who imposed their views on the party. “People of integrity don’t force their beliefs on others,” he had said then. “They make sure that others can live by different beliefs they may have.” But now, with the immensely controversial decision making gay marriage legal in his home state, social conservatives nationally were sounding the alarm. Romney made a fateful decision: he would become a leading crusader against gay marriage.

He railed against “activist judges,” whom he accused of remaking American society by fiat, asserting that the Massachusetts justices had issued their landmark ruling to promote their liberal values and those of “their like-minded friends in the communities they socialize in.” It was a sneer perhaps aimed at Cambridge, home to Harvard and to the chief justice of the court, Margaret H. Marshall. He pressed Congress to pass a federal gay-marriage ban and lobbied Massachusetts lawmakers hard on a proposed state ban, once making a show of distributing copies of the state constitution to legislators after the legislature resisted holding a vote on the measure. He warned at a nationally broadcast anti-gay-marriage rally at a Boston church about the threat from “the religion of secularism.”