The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly
Republicans in Massachusetts and elsewhere took note of Romney’s success, and his political star rose rapidly. For a time he avoided responding to rumors about his future (would he run for office in Utah? return to Massachusetts?), and he had expressed his reluctance to run against a fellow Republican—which seemed to rule out Massachusetts for the moment, since it was then governed by its third consecutive Republican, the acting governor Jane Swift. But Swift’s poll numbers were dropping by the day, and both Democrats and Republicans were attacking her. A “Draft Mitt” campaign sprouted up in the state, leading Swift to gripe that “powerful men” were trying to force her to step aside.Though it seems in retrospect that Romney’s entrance into the 2002 race was a foregone conclusion, both Romneys say that’s not so. Ann Romney had grown to love living in Utah. (Among other reasons, she’d been found to have multiple sclerosis a few years earlier, and horseback riding in the Utah mountains was therapeutic.) And they still bore the scars of the 1994 campaign. But the forces beckoning Romney to run were too strong to resist. Nearly everyone, it seemed, wanted him. Swift saw the writing on the wall: the day Romney declared he would be running in the Republican primary, she ceded the nomination without a fight.
Democrats tried in vain to keep him off the ballot, challenging his residency by citing his Utah driver’s license and the fact that his home in Park City was classified as his primary residence. During the general election Romney said that he (like Governors William Weld and Paul Cellucci before him) was a different kind of Republican: a Massachusetts-friendly Republican, fiscally conservative but socially moderate and respectful of different ethnic origins and sexual orientations. He wouldn’t mess with the pro-choice laws on the state books, he said. Meanwhile, in time-honored fashion, he painted the Democratic nominee, Shannon O’Brien, who was state treasurer, as a Beacon Hill insider, and himself as the outsider unsullied by previous association with statehouse cronyism. In the end the race was reasonably close, but it was Romney who took the oath of office in January of 2003.
Some people saw the inclusion of Democrats in his cabinet as a sign of a kinder, gentler era of state politics, but they were soon disabused of that notion. Romney called (with limited success) for the most sweeping changes in state government in a generation, aiming to merge previously independent agencies and eliminate jobs. He threatened to eliminate the position of president of the state’s university system; its occupant, the former state senate president William Bulger, had upset Romney by taking the Fifth during congressional testimony about his brother, the mobster “Whitey” Bulger, who is wanted in connection with the murders of nineteen people. Romney’s plan was defeated in the state senate, but Bulger eventually resigned anyway. Faced with a $3 billion deficit and having pledged not to raise taxes, Romney slashed social programs, the higher-education budget, and local aid to cities and towns. Although he boasts that the state ran a $700 million budget surplus in 2004, Michael Widmer, the head of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, points out that the number does not reflect a true structural surplus—only the fact that revenues came in higher last year than the conservative targets the Romney administration and the legislature had set.
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.