The cloud of adjectives that has come to hover over the Republican candidate Mitt Romney in news reports is familiar by now: smooth, smart, slick; detached, disciplined, dogged; pragmatic, protean, phony; careful, cautious, calculating.
Journalists have described him as robotic (not unlike Al Gore), father-haunted (not unlike George W Bush), disdainful of hands-on politicking (not unlike Barack Obama) and capable of complete flip-flops on hot-button issues (not unlike Newt Gingrich). He has been hailed for his analytic business skills as a turnaround specialist, and assailed as a job-killing vulture capitalist; lauded for his skill in getting healthcare legislation passed in Massachusetts, and criticised by both the left and right for subsequently trying to distance himself from that achievement.
A new biography, The Real Romney, by two reporters from The Boston Globe, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, won’t substantially alter such perceptions of the candidate. The book retraces familiar ground, but it pulls together lots of details into a narrative that’s absorbing and fair-minded.
Drawing on the collective expertise of The Globe’s staff in covering Mr Romney’s tenure as Massachusetts governor and his lucrative career at the private-equity firm Bain Capital, the book judiciously assesses his evolving views (or, in some cases, outright reversals) on an array of social issues, while trying to evaluate assertions he’s made on the campaign trail .
The authors conclude, for instance, that it’s impossible to independently verify Mr Romney’s claim that he helped create a “net, net” of tens of thousands of jobs (a claim ratified by Bain Capital officials in 2011, though without documentation) “with anything approaching certainty”. They reason: “Many companies that Romney held briefly were in private hands and changed owners numerous times. They were saddled with debt, restructured, and split up. Some companies under Romney’s control prospered, and some failed; some produced new jobs, and others shut down and left people out of work.”
Perhaps the most useful portions of The Real Romney deconstruct his management style as a Bain executive and governor of Massachusetts, providing clues as to how he might govern as president. Also instructive are the detailed accounts of Mr Romney’s unsuccessful effort to unseat Senator Edward M Kennedy in 1994 and his unsuccessful effort to win the Republican presidential nomination in 2008 — accounts that shed some light on his chameleonlike political stands and his current travails in the primary process.
The authors note that from the start of Mr Romney’s foray into politics, the question of identity – What did he believe?” – was central. They write that in his campaign against Senator Kennedy: “Some of his positions seemed to be calibrated for voter approval, not necessarily reflective of personal convictions. Strategy trumped ideology: what kind of candidate did he need to be to win?”
Mindful of Kennedy’s legacy as a defender of civil rights and William Weld’s ascent to the Massachusetts governorship as a socially liberal Republican, Mr Romney’s Senate campaign tried to “present him as an acceptable choice on social issues to independents, wayward Democrats, and especially women”. Mr Romney, the authors report, did not join the Republican Party until October 1993 and had previously given money to Democratic Congressional candidates.
Early in the Senate race, they write, Mr Romney “established himself as a passionate supporter of abortion rights”, despite his personal opposition to abortion, and “his professed views would grow more liberal over the course of the race”. They report that he endorsed the legalisation of RU-486, the abortion-inducing drug, and appeared at a fund-raiser for Planned Parenthood.
Mr Romney would later explain, however, that a November 2004 meeting with a Harvard University stem-cell researcher triggered “an awakening on ‘life’ issues”. He began calling himself “firmly prolife” and made “a series of shifts” as his gubernatorial term went on. These issues included abstinence-only sex education, a plan to reduce greenhouse gases and gay rights.
Several advisers warned that Mr Romney’s efforts to cast himself as a true social conservative would backfire and that he should focus on his economic message in the 2008 presidential nomination race. Instead, the authors write, the campaign embraced a strategy that relied heavily on the idea that Senator John McCain and Rudolph W Giuliani “would fight for the more moderate voters within the GOP primaries and caucuses, leaving Romney room to court the right”.
After the collapse of his 2008 presidential bid, Mr Romney talked through the failure with his advisers, crunching the numbers and evaluating what went wrong. He concluded, say Mr Helman and Mr Kranish, that “he had failed to get across what he was really all about,” that “he had lacked definition.”
©2012 The New York Times News Service
THE REAL ROMNEY
Michael Kranish and Scott Helman
Harper
401 pages; Rs 27.99
