The Real Romney (37 page)

M
ore than three years had elapsed since Tom Stemberg nudged Mitt Romney to tackle universal health care. Many more years had passed since the state’s last attempt at it. But now Massachusetts was finally on the precipice. And Romney, who had invested whatever political capital he had left, was a big reason why. He was jubilant. “Today, Massachusetts has set itself apart from every other state in the country,” he said, beaming, after lawmakers publicly unveiled the bill. “An achievement like this comes once in a generation.” Romney stopped by DiMasi’s and Travaglini’s offices before his press conference to thank and congratulate them.

Given Romney’s reticence about penalizing employers, his rhetoric on that issue caught the press corps by surprise. Asked if there were any parts of the bill he would veto, he said he still needed to review it all but, “We are where we’d hoped we’d be.” Didn’t he consider the penalty on employers a tax, as antitax activists did? And hadn’t he pledged to veto any taxes? “It’s not a tax hike,” Romney responded. “It’s a fee. It’s an assessment.” Businesses and workers who purchased health insurance already paid an assessment to help fund the “free care” pool, he noted, and “it makes sense to expand this assessment.” As the press conference wore on, Romney reserved his right to review closely the employer assessment and other elements that had been added by the Democratic legislature. But his tone throughout signaled that he had no major objections. Toward the end, he was asked again: was he really okay with the new employer penalty? Romney said he was relieved that what he had feared most—a new, broad-based payroll tax on employers—was not in the plan. That was something, he said, that he “definitely would have been unable to sign.” “This,” he continued, “is of a different nature.”

The next day, April 4, the bill sailed through the House and Senate with virtually no opposition. They called it “An Act Providing Access to Affordable, Quality, Accountable Health Care.” A signing ceremony was set for April 12, 2006, at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall. Romney and state lawmakers knew they had done something big. The bipartisan bonhomie did not last long, however. The day before the ceremony, Romney published an op-ed in
The Wall Street Journal
whose cheery title—“Health Care for Everyone? We Found a Way”—masked a last-minute shift. His “Democratic counterparts,” he wrote, had added a $295-per-person fee on employers that refused to help cover their workers. The same fee he had seemed comfortable with just a week earlier he was now labeling “unnecessary and probably counterproductive.” He promised to “take corrective action,” which meant a veto. Democrats felt sandbagged. This was a compromise that had been carefully worked out among many parties, including the business community. It would not raise a huge amount of revenue—$45 million was the estimate, and even that has proven to be overblown. But the principle was important to many involved in crafting the bill: employers had to put some skin into the game, too.

Right before the April 12 signing ceremony began, Romney aides announced in a press release that he was vetoing 8 of the 147 sections, including the employer mandate. There was little risk to Romney, who knew that the legislature would easily override him, as it did three weeks later. He could thus claim a large share of credit for the new law while washing his hands of something resembling a tax, which was problematic with the national Republican audience he was now courting heavily. But his eleventh-hour rejection of the employer mandate tainted the celebratory mood. DiMasi was outraged. Travaglini, however, said he wasn’t surprised and didn’t particularly care, because he knew the legislature would override Romney anyway. “It didn’t bother me,” he said, “because I had the votes.”

Like most of Romney’s momentous public events, the bill-signing extravaganza was a masterwork of political stagecraft, in a setting that evoked many important events in the nation’s history. Guests received programs printed on faux parchment with commemorative lapel pins to match. The stage of the majestic hall was augmented with a pedestal for the podium and an extended platform with a desk on a circular oriental carpet. On either side were banners to mark the occasion: “Making History in Healthcare.” The procession to the stage was led by a fife-and-drum corps clad in tricorn hats, breeches, and stockings, playing Colonial tunes. An audience of several hundred VIPs greeted Romney warmly with a thirty-second ovation.

As Romney spoke, the top of his head reached the frame of the majestic room’s focal point, George P. A. Healy’s enormous painting
Webster Replying to Hayne
, which depicts one of the most famous speeches ever delivered in the U.S. Senate during the debate over states’ rights. “This is a politician’s dream, you’ve got to admit,” Romney began. He thanked Cecil B. DeMille, the late Hollywood producer of film spectacles, for organizing the event. “This does classify as being over the top.” Privately, Romney had been uneasy about all the pomp, unsure how he would want to frame his association with the law politically down the road. Referring to the last time he and Kennedy had been at Faneuil Hall, for the pivotal 1994 debate, Romney quipped, “This for me feels a bit like the
Titanic
returning to visit the iceberg.” He said to hearty laughs, introducing Kennedy as “my colleague and friend,” “My son said that having Senator Kennedy and me together like this on the stage, behind the same piece of landmark legislation, will help slow global warming. That’s because Hell has frozen over.”

Kennedy was also greeted enthusiastically and after thanking Romney, he said, “My son said something, too, and that is when Kennedy and Romney support a piece of legislation, usually one of them hasn’t read it.” When the laughter subsided, he turned to Romney and said, “That’s not true today, is it governor?” Then he turned serious. “This is an achievement for all the people of our commonwealth and perhaps for the rest of America, too,” he proclaimed. “And we intend to make the most of it.” Romney moved to the desk and used each of fourteen commemorative pens during the signing. “It’s law,” he said upon finishing. “Congratulations.” The ceremony was over in forty minutes.

On that spring day, as he inked his name to the law, Romney knew he was going to launch a national campaign in the ensuing months. What he didn’t know was how his health care push would play for him politically. “I have to admit that I’m very, very proud of having been part of this process,” he said after the bill signing. “But I have no way of guessing whether it’s going to be a help or a hindrance down the road. Time will tell.”

M
ore than five years later, it remains an open question. Passage of the law remains his greatest political achievement, but it has also become linked in infamy, in the eyes of his conservative critics, with the national health overhaul pushed through by President Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress. Romney has said repeatedly that the Massachusetts law could serve as a model for other states, but he rejects comparisons with the national plan. “I think that there is a recognition that what we did with my leadership and that of others was to follow the constitutional principle of states’ rights—that we were a laboratory of democracy,” Romney said. “We carried out an experiment, and that’s a right and proper thing to do under the Constitution. . . . What the president did was to impose a one-size-fits-all plan on the nation.”

Michael Leavitt, who, as U.S. secretary of health and human services, gave final approval to the Massachusetts plan in July 2006, later said that about half the states had inquired about developing some aspect of what Massachusetts had done. “I don’t know if what Mitt Romney did is a conservative idea or a liberal idea,” Leavitt said. “But it is clearly an innovative idea.”

But has it worked? A detailed examination by
The Boston Globe
in 2011 of voluminous health care and financial data, and interviews conducted with key figures in every sector of the health care system, found that although there have been some stumbles—and some elements merit a grade of “incomplete”—the overhaul has worked as well as or better than expected, especially in accomplishing its principal goal of expanding coverage to almost every citizen. The percentage of residents without insurance is down dramatically, according to one survey, to less than 2 percent; for children, the figure is a tiny fraction of 1 percent. Those are the lowest rates in the nation. Recent U.S. Census data, however, put the percentage of uninsured slightly higher, indicating an uptick from 2009 to 2010.

Many more businesses are offering insurance to employees than were before the law; the fear going in was that the opposite would happen. The plan remains exceptionally popular among state residents; indeed, its popularity has only grown with time. There are some unhappy sectors—notably small-business owners, who had hoped to see moderating premiums and chafe, in some cases, at the state’s heavy-handed enforcement of the rules. And support for the requirement that individuals obtain insurance is down to a slender majority, a June 2011 poll showed.

Health care costs continue to grow at alarming rates, as they have nationally, but the consensus of industry leaders and health care economists is that the trend cannot be fairly traced to the makeover but rather to cost pressures baked into the existing health care payment system. Massachusetts does have among the highest health care costs in the nation, but it owned this dubious distinction long before Romney launched his push for universal coverage. The state’s share of costs, however, has been rising, and hospitals are bearing an increasing share of the load.

By any reasonable assessment, failure—the blunt summary offered by Romney’s foes—doesn’t describe his push for universal health care. But neither is the law an unalloyed success. It remains a work in progress, an ongoing experiment, especially when it comes to bringing costs down.

As Romney left the statehouse for the campaign trail, he was clearly wary of how the health care law would look. He made sure to describe it as “conservative” and “market-based” before Republican audiences and suggested that its success would be in doubt once the Democrats “get their hands [on] it.” He made light of Kennedy’s appearance at the bill signing, saying later, “I was a little concerned at the signing ceremony when Ted Kennedy showed up.” (Romney later contended that the remark had been merely a setup for a joke.) He later blamed his Democratic successor for fumbling the law’s implementation.

But he has never fully disavowed it, as some suggested he do. “A lot of pundits around the nation are saying that I should just stand up and say this whole thing was a mistake, that it was a boneheaded idea, and I should just admit it,” Romney said. “But there’s only one problem with that: It wouldn’t be honest. I, in fact, did what I believed was right for the people of my state.” He recounted an instance when a man had stopped him as he came out of a supermarket near his house and said, “Your health plan saved my life.” That, he said, “obviously warms my heart.”

R
omney’s accomplishment on health care stood out in Massachusetts both for its merits and because it served as a reminder of what had made him such an attractive candidate for governor in the first place. He’d come in promising to shake up the system. And on the issue he had invested himself in more than any other, he had done just that. But that success raised a question, too: what else could he have achieved had he committed himself more to the job? “Significant successes,” such as health care reform “showed what Romney might have accomplished as governor had he focused his efforts more steadily on state policy leadership,” said Brian R. Gilmore, an executive vice president of Associated Industries of Massachusetts, which represents thousands of businesses. Others believe that Romney’s record will hold up better over time. “I’m not naive enough to think that people obviously [don’t] have some disappointment,” Bradley H. Jones, Jr., the Republican leader in the Massachusetts House and frequent Romney ally, said at the end of Romney’s term. “My hope is that, like many things in life, when there’s a little bit of distance, people will take a broader view.”

Romney himself said he was pleased at how much he had gotten done, despite a legislature so dominated by Democrats. “The truth is, if you look at the record, it’s a heck of a lot more than I expected I’d get done in four years,” he said. “I’ll put it up against any other governor’s in America, not because I’m brilliant, but because the legislature and we did pretty well together.”

On the evening of January 3, 2007, Romney took the customary final walk out of the statehouse. And as usual, the stagecraft was off the charts. With cameras recording, he left the third-floor office and, with Ann at his side, descended the thirty-one steps of the statehouse. Along the way, he made a series of planned stops designed to highlight his record. He greeted the family of Melanie Powell, a thirteen-year-old killed by a repeat drunk driver and memorialized by Melanie’s Law, the tough drunken driving bill he had signed. He met students attending state colleges under the John and Abigail Adams Scholarships he had created. And he welcomed two families able to afford health insurance because of the new law. Then the Romneys left Boston’s Beacon Hill and returned home to Belmont for a quiet evening, a chapter of their life closed. The opening words of the next chapter had already been written. An hour before Romney departed the statehouse, the Federal Election Commission docketed a four-page form establishing a new political organization: the Romney for President Exploratory Committee.

[ Eleven ]

A Right Turn on the Presidential Trail

I know something about tailspins and it’s pretty clear Mitt Romney is in one.

—SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN ON HIS CAMPAIGN FOE

I
t was just hours after passage of his health care bill—the single greatest achievement of his political life—and Governor Mitt Romney’s thoughts had turned to Iowa. Settled into a top-floor suite at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, high above Boston Common, he was expecting a relaxed, chatty evening with a handful of Republican leaders from the first-caucus state. But the meeting quickly went awry. Romney had hoped that one of his guests, Doug Gross, would become chairman of his Iowa campaign. But Gross, an intense man who had grown up in a town called Defiance and was now a high-powered lawyer in Des Moines, wasn’t convinced. He grilled the Massachusetts governor, beginning with a subject he knew might upset Romney: how would Romney handle questions about his Mormon faith in a state where the GOP caucuses are dominated by Christian conservatives, many of whom don’t believe that Mormons are Christians?

“I’m not changing my religion,” Romney said, growing testy, according to another participant.

“I’m not asking you to,” Gross responded.

He moved on to his second question, and the atmosphere continued to cool. “We are sitting up here, up top of the Ritz-Carlton, you are fabulously successful, hopelessly wealthy compared to most people,” Gross continued, noting Romney’s starched shirt, fastidiously coiffed hair, and privileged upbringing. “Can you really relate to an average voter?” At that, Romney’s wife, Ann, stormed out of the room. Romney, in turn, became so angry and insulted that “he didn’t talk to me the rest of the night,” Gross said—even when the two men later sat side by side at a women’s collegiate basketball championship game. “It was the coldest shoulder I’ve ever experienced.”

Mitt Romney felt ready to run for president, ready to take the one career step that would fulfill his dream and succeed where his father, George, had fallen short. But he wasn’t ready for the most obvious questions that would come his way. He may not have felt he had to be, for solving problems and answering hard questions were skills he prided himself on, and with reason—his talents had shown through at Bain, at the Utah Olympics, and in the just-completed battle over health care. He had made millions of dollars and made his name. Still, there was a brittleness to his self-certainty, which came through loud and clear to Gross. And for potential allies like him, that was worrisome.

But it wasn’t a deal killer; Gross decided to sign on. Romney, he concluded, had a unique set of attributes that could enable him to win the election and be a superb president. Romney had excelled in many realms, including as a Republican governor in a Democratic state, and—this was key—had boundless financial means. For his part, Romney, despite his irritation at the questioning, knew he needed Gross’s connections. So Gross agreed to chair Romney’s Iowa campaign, showering the governor with public praise. It was the start of a relationship that began in a bad place and was destined to grow worse. The things that troubled Gross at the outset—Romney’s defensiveness when challenged, his resistance to advice from outside his immediate circle, his failure to face just how little he knew about running for president—would ultimately drive his campaign down a very bumpy road. It would leave behind bruises, frayed alliances, and a lingering question: what would he learn?

T
he PowerPoint slides rolled across the screen, each equally brutal in its description of the candidate:

Perception—phony.

Slick—not human (hair?)

You do not know where WMR [Willard Mitt Romney] comes from . . .

No story beyond cold business, Olympic turnaround, CEO governor.

This was not an attack by one of Romney’s opponents. It was a production of his own media team, war-gaming the likely lines of attack against him. It was a few months after the Ritz-Carlton meeting, and Romney’s advisers had gathered to try to address a series of questions: Who is Mitt Romney? What is the perception of him among voters? How could the campaign shape or reshape that image? As the slides rolled on, a recommendation appeared on one. What was needed, it said, was the creation of a “Primal Code for Brand Romney”—a core message that could be embedded in the minds of voters.

The media adviser behind the presentation, Alex Castellanos, knew all about political war games. He was a Cuban native whose parents had had $11 in their pockets when they’d fled Fidel Castro and brought him to the United States. Castellanos had become a favorite of Republican presidential candidates for his deeply conservative principles, his unsparing assessments of the political landscape, and his tough tactics. Romney had hired Castellanos and directed him to pull no punches, so Castellanos compiled a scathing catalog of his new client’s perceived liabilities. The PowerPoint presentation went on to contrast Romney with two leading likely rivals, Senator John McCain and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. McCain was a former prisoner of war and a hero, and Giuliani was known as “America’s mayor” because of the way he had responded to the 9/11 attacks. Both had credible credentials for taking on the presidency during the war on terrorism. Romney had nothing similar.

One of the campaign’s chief concerns was that Romney would be tagged, as one slide put it, as “Flip-flop Mitt,” given his changes on issues such as abortion. The media team urged Romney to counter that with a forward-looking brand. One of the slides suggested that Romney use this as his catchphrase: “Yes, we can.” But Barack Obama would take it before Romney could. Whatever the phrase, Romney had to be sold as an “optimistic, conservative leader who is calling upon the strength of the American people [to] lead us into the future, to a better place.”

The Romney campaign team also zeroed in on what they called the problem of the three M’s: Mormon, millionaire, Massachusetts. “There is a perception out there that there is this rich guy from a liberal state who’s got a funny religion,” as Romney’s campaign manager, Beth Myers, later put it in a Harvard University Institute of Politics seminar. A poll by the
Los Angeles Times
and Bloomberg found that 37 percent of those surveyed would not vote for a Mormon for president, and the percentage was even higher among those likely to show up in Republican caucuses and primaries. A Gallup Poll taken around the same time found that 66 percent of those surveyed did not believe the country was ready for a Mormon president.

Yet winning in key early states such as Iowa and South Carolina would require support from religious conservatives, who were deemed least likely to back a Mormon. It was a topic that Romney would variously try to tackle head-on or try to dismiss as irrelevant. In the end, however, the campaign could not ignore the polls. Many people simply didn’t understand Mormonism. The campaign’s conclusion was that Romney needed a proxy, preferably an evangelical leader with national credentials, who could vouch for him.

So it seemed almost providential that, just as Romney was trying to decide how to deal with the issue, one of his aides received an unsolicited phone call from one of the most influential evangelicals in America—not a pastor but a savvy Atlanta public relations agent. Mark DeMoss had built a successful business that promoted conservative Christian organizations, giving him connections to nearly every important evangelical leader in the nation. DeMoss had never met Romney, but he believed that the governor was being unfairly tarred. Though DeMoss knew that some Christian leaders didn’t consider Mormons to be Christians, he felt it made no sense to disqualify a Mormon from the presidency. Moreover, DeMoss was sold on Romney, impressed by his experience in government and business. The governor cleared his schedule to meet with DeMoss.

“You can’t pay me anything, ever,” DeMoss told Romney when the two met on September 11, 2006. If anyone thought DeMoss was profiting from the relationship, it would backfire. DeMoss urged Romney to meet evangelical leaders and face questions about Mormonism head-on. Romney agreed. And six weeks later, a who’s who of evangelical leaders arrived at the governor’s Belmont home, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham. A plate of sandwiches was laid out in the kitchen, and then the guests joined Romney and his wife in the den. They took their seats in a circle of chairs as Romney said: Ask me anything you want.

D
r. Richard Land, one of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, awoke at his hotel at 5 a.m. and headed to the airport in Lubbock, Texas, anxious to fulfill his agreement to join other evangelicals at the meeting with Romney. In his role as head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Liberty Commission, Land was often cited as the most recognizable and respected voice in his denomination, which counts 16 million members in 42,000 churches in the United States. With his deep basso voice, ample girth, and blunt-spoken manner, he loomed large on any stage where presidential politics was discussed. Like many in his faith, Land questioned whether Mormons were Christian. He had said Mormonism might be considered a “fourth Abrahamic religion,” the others being Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. But Land also believed that there should be—in Thomas Jefferson’s famous words—a “wall of separation” between church and state. It was the persecution of Virginia Baptists that had helped convince Jefferson that government should not interfere with religion. Mormons, too, believed they had been persecuted by government—Romney’s own great-grandfather had been pursued by armed U.S. forces seeking to arrest him on polygamy charges. Romney might never convince Land and other Southern Baptists of the virtues of Mormonism. But it was reasonable to believe that he and Land could agree about the need to keep the institutions of government and the church separate and that the concerns about Romney’s religion would then begin to fade away.

As Land listened to his fellow evangelical leaders question Romney, one of them put the matter directly: “You do understand, Governor, that most evangelicals don’t accept Mormonism as an orthodox Trinitarian faith?” Romney replied that he was well aware of that and assured Land and the others that he would keep his Mormon faith out of political decisions. Land then urged Romney to give a speech assuring Americans that his Mormonism would not influence him in the White House—and deliver it soon, preferably in Iowa. To underscore his point, Land showed Romney a copy of John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 address to Houston ministers, which Land considered a well-worded assurance by Kennedy that his decisions would not be influenced by the Catholic Church. Make a speech like that, Land said. Romney promised to think about it. As the meeting came to a close, the men and women bowed their heads. A prayer was said for Romney and his prospective presidential campaign. Shortly afterward, Colonial-style chairs were shipped to all of those who had attended. The chairs had an engraved brass plate on the back that said, “There is always a place for you at our table—Mitt Romney.”

Confident now that they could swing Christian conservatives their way, the Romney team settled on their strategy. Instead of avoiding social issues and keeping a distance from evangelicals, Romney would “dive right” and bet on winning in a place where evangelicals held extraordinary power: the first-caucus state of Iowa. If Romney could win there, the Mormon issue would be off the table, and Romney might be on the path toward the nomination.

T
hey called it “Romney World,” a campaign headquarters that filled the former Roche Bobois furniture store at 585 Commercial Street, a three-story gray-and-tan North End waterfront building. The windows in Romney’s top-floor corner office provided sweeping views of Boston Harbor, the Leonard P. Zakim Bridge, and the Bunker Hill Monument. In prominent positions, pictures of George Romney were always the exemplar, in success and failure, for his son. Romney World was more than a physical location; it described a state of loyalty to Romney among his closest advisers that would be matched by few campaigns. To those even slightly outside this inner circle, getting through to the candidate seemed nearly impossible. At the head of this group, with an office next door to Romney’s, sat Beth Myers. She had served as the governor’s chief of staff for four years and was now charged with managing a national campaign, something she had never done.

It had long been presumed that Mike Murphy, Romney’s political guru in his 2002 campaign, would reprise that role in 2008. He was renowned for a wisecracking and sometimes outrageous style that seemed at odds with the buttoned-down Romney. He relished playing the role of an inverse Romney, with his casual appearance, but was also like the candidate in his self-certitude. Romney aides variously called Murphy the campaign “Svengali,” “mastermind,” “alter ego,” and a number of other double-edged superlatives. Just as Karl Rove was considered “Bush’s brain” during George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, Murphy was the muscle behind Mitt.

Murphy’s success came partly from his ability to convince recalcitrant candidates to run negative attack ads against opponents, sometimes by leavening the commercials with humor. It was Murphy who, in his role as Romney’s consultant in the 2002 gubernatorial campaign, had told Romney that Murphy’s own soft-and-fuzzy family ads weren’t working and convinced Romney to attack rival Shannon O’Brien. Romney, in his book
Turnaround
, credited Murphy with “sheer brilliance” and called him “hilarious.” Murphy, meanwhile, was ensconced in his modern home atop Laurel Canyon, with its vista of the Los Angeles Basin, where he split his time between screenwriting and plotting Romney’s presidential bid. Even when Murphy tried to give a convoluted explanation for Romney’s turnabout on abortion—telling the conservative
National Review
that Romney had been “a pro-life Mormon faking it as a pro-choice friendly”—Romney stood by Murphy and accepted the explanation that the comment had been taken out of context.