The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly
As governor, Romney didn’t always toe the GOP line. A champion of civil rights and a perceived moderate, he walked out on Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in San Francisco in 1964. He also instituted Michigan’s first income tax. But in the late 1960s the Republican Party was still a place with room for the likes of Nelson Rockefeller, and Romney was an early favorite for his party’s 1968 presidential nomination. Not for long, though. His candidacy was badly shaken when—though he had initially supported U.S. military involvement in Vietnam—he described an extremely disenchanting trip he had made to visit the troops there and said, “I just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get when you go over to Vietnam, not only by the generals but also by the diplomatic corps over there, and they do a very thorough job.” He dropped out of the race two weeks before the New Hampshire primary.“It did tell me you have to be very, very careful in your choice of words,” Mitt said when I asked him about his dad’s experience. “The careful selection of words is something I’m more attuned to because Dad fell into that quagmire.”
Mitt Romney’s initial foray into politics was not a success. In 1994 he spent $3 million of his own money in a campaign to topple the mighty Ted Kennedy from his perch in the U.S. Senate. Why did he waste money on such a quixotic project? “I felt very strongly that the social programs of the sixties and seventies, the liberal agenda—I’ll call it the Johnson agenda—had hurt working families, had hurt the poor in many instances,” he told me. “And while the liberals had the best of intentions, I felt that the programs themselves had created a permanent underclass and had fostered poverty instead of eliminating it.”
At first few people paid Romney’s candidacy much heed. After all, in his six previous Senate campaigns Kennedy had scarcely been challenged, so what did he have to fear from an upstart venture capitalist with no political experience? More than he had bargained for, as it turned out. Less than two months before the election a complacent Kennedy was stunned to find himself virtually tied with Romney in the polls. All of a sudden everyone was paying attention: could a Kennedy actually lose in Massachusetts?
Once awakened, the Kennedy apparatus cranked up. Because Romney had no political record to run against, Kennedy ran against his private-sector career, attacking his business decisions and the way he ran his companies. Striking employees from a paper company called Ampad (which was owned by Bain Capital) traveled from central Indiana to Boston to rail against Romney’s alleged disregard for manufacturing jobs. “I got caught up in all the ‘Romney’s a venture capitalist, he’s laid off people,’” Romney said. “Well, no, I didn’t—it wasn’t my factory.” But the damage was done. Kennedy won going away.
July 30th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
I read the article, Gurl, and I agree that it is very good. Questions like those about the garments WILL be asked, and geting them out of the way early, and in a manner which flatters the Governor, are a bonus.
I honestly think that the punditocracy is overestimating the hostility of evangelicals to Mormons. What they want is a moral PERSON, and Romney is that.
Don’t forget, Gore was the Baptist, and Bush is a Methodist. The person is bigger than the denomination.