The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly
Romney doesn’t have enough votes in the legislature to sustain a veto, so his initiatives are repeatedly thwarted. He put a lot of effort into campaigning for local Republican candidates in 2004, only to see his party lose three seats in the statehouse.Steve Adams, formerly the head of the Pioneer Institute, a conservative think tank in Boston, and now with the Small Business Administration, concedes that Romney doesn’t have much to show in the way of legislative accomplishment. But that, Adams says, is because the Democrat-dominated statehouse “won’t give him anything.” Phil Johnston, the chair of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, isn’t buying this: “To say ‘I can’t do anything’ because the legislature won’t let him is ridiculous. Romney doesn’t reach out to people. He tries to destroy them and then says it’s nothing personal.” But Adams argues that what Romney has succeeded in doing is reshaping public-policy debate. Adams says that in recent history the only way for Republicans to get anything done in Massachusetts was to cave in completely on certain issues in exchange for compromise on others. According to Adams, Romney is saying, “I’m not willing to compromise over here for this win. I’m willing to come halfway with you on an issue, but I’m not going to give up on issue A so that I can win on issue B.”
When I told Romney what Adams had said, the governor told me he appreciated the free pass he had been given, but that he would respectfully decline to take it—because he has managed to pass some measures and doesn’t consider any of the outstanding ones to have failed irredeemably yet. He handed me a document that listed ninety-seven promises he had made during his 2002 campaign, each one falling into one of three categories: “done,” “ongoing,” or “not yet.” An asterisk indicated those promises on which he had tried to act but had been rebuffed by the legislature. There is something distinctly Romneyesque about the document: the businessman’s ledgerlike mentality; the deep concern that he be seen as a man of his word, a man who will try his hardest to deliver on whatever he promises; and the sheer earnestness. It’s the same earnestness that’s reflected in his ability to toggle from Bain analytic mode to golly-gee mode in seconds flat. I once heard him, in the kitchen of a home in a fifty-five-and-over community near Cape Cod, go from rattling off numbers concerning COBRA payments and health-insurance premiums to saying eagerly, “Well, let’s have some of this banana bread!” Romney’s sincerity, oddly enough, can sometimes make him seem artificial—but it’s a sincerity that others can only hope to fake.
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.