Romney Debate Coach Cited as Potential Game-Changer
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis - Jan 30, 2012 6:45 AM CT
The call went out the night Mitt Romney lost the South Carolina primary.
Brett O’Donnell, award winning debate-coach to college students and presidential candidates alike, was needed in Florida, where Romney would be preparing for two televised debates over the next five days that could be pivotal to his chances of winning the state’s Jan. 31 primary.
O’Donnell was in Tampa the next day, and less than 48 hours later, a pithier and more combative Romney showed up Jan. 23 to debate Newt Gingrich, who had dominated two such televised gatherings in South Carolina in performances strategists credited with propelling him to victory there Jan. 21.
Romney’s feistier delivery and more aggressive style that night -- reprised Jan. 26 in Jacksonville -- may have helped turn the tide for him in Florida, where polls show him surging.
Danny Palmer, 63, a retired pilot from the Pensacola suburb of Gulf Breeze, said he had been “firmly a Newt Gingrich supporter” before the Jan. 26 debate when Romney focused on the former speaker’s consulting work for Freddie Mac, a government- sponsored mortgage lending company that has required billions in taxpayer bail-out funds.
“The turning point for me was when Newt brought up the fact of Mitt’s investing in Freddie Mac, and he turned it back on Newt and said, ‘You have the same stuff!’ He showed some fight,” said Palmer, who now backs Romney.
Master Coach
It came as no surprise to campaign operatives and debate specialists who have worked with O’Donnell and call him a master coach, as adept at preparing candidates to make their points succinctly as he is at pumping them up before they take the stage.
“Brett actually studied and taught debate at the highest levels before bringing his considerable chops to politics,” said Mark McKinnon, a Republican strategist who worked with O’Donnell on former President George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign.
Romney, 64, deserves most of the credit for his improved debate performances last week, McKinnon said, adding: “But having Brett O’Donnell aboard for debate prep is going to raise the level of anyone’s game, because Brett is simply the best in the business.”
‘Loud and Clear’
Romney discussed his improved performance in an interview today on NBC’s “Today” program. “We were getting just wailed on by Speaker Gingrich and really didn’t respond very well” in South Carolina, he said. The shift in momentum in Florida is the result of making sure “that our message is out loud and clear,” he said.
A Quinnipiac University poll released today shows Romney with a 14-point lead -- 43 percent to 29 percent -- over Gingrich, up from a nine-point lead on Jan. 27. The margin of error of the telephone poll, which surveyed 539 likely voters in the Republican primary, is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
Romney credited the two debates in Florida for the change in sentiment. “I was able to confront Speaker Gingrich,” he said. “I pushed back on the attacks.”
O’Donnell, 47, who like other members of Romney’s team declined to be interviewed for this story, played down his role in Romney’s debate turnaround last week.
“Governor Romney’s a very good candidate, so it was just a matter of talking through strategy,” O’Donnell told WSET-TV, an ABC affiliate in Lynchburg, Virginia on Jan. 27.
The former Massachusetts governor’s campaign had phoned him the previous Saturday night and he was at work coaching Romney by the following Monday morning, he told the station.
Debate Experts’ Perspective
Debating experts could see the difference. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania said while Romney’s earlier performances were “competent,” and showed a command of detail, they were not particularly memorable and in some cases -- particularly when he was under fire for refusing to immediately release his tax returns -- featured halting answers, awkward pauses, and indecisive language.
“Instead of leaning into the podium, he leaned back from it,” Jamieson said in an e-mail. In the Jacksonville debate, she said, “his answers were quicker and delivered in a more decisive and aggressive fashion.” And Romney “got the final word in key exchanges with Gingrich, and won audience applause for doing so.”
Jamieson said changes of that scope in such a short period of time “are probably the result of coaching. His best moments were clearly rehearsed, but nonetheless effectively delivered,” she said.
Goading Gingrich
Romney began the Jan. 26 debate demanding an apology from Gingrich for using what he called “inexcusable” and “repulsive” language in a Florida radio advertisement that branded Romney “anti-immigrant.” Later, he goaded Gingrich into rehashing his criticism of Romney’s wealth, pouncing when he did with an energetic defense of his financial fortunes that concluded, “I’m proud of being successful.”
And when Gingrich, 68, portrayed Romney’s position that all illegal immigrants should leave the U.S. as impractical, citing how unlikely it was that grandmothers would be deported, Romney was ready with a riposte:
“Our problem is not 11 million grandmothers,” he said, drawing applause that had eluded him in past debates.
‘Tuning Things Up’
Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior campaign adviser, said Romney had been “deliberately trying to keep things cool, but also be firm at the same time.” Fehrnstrom said most of the debate preparation happened early on, and Romney’s more recent rehearsals had been “just a matter of tuning things up.”
Romney also had received some debate advice from New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who urged him to go on rhetorical offense, according to two people familiar with their conversation who asked for anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The skills Romney displayed on the debate stage last week are vintage O’Donnell, said Michael Hall, his former student and later co-debate coach with O’Donnell at Liberty University, an evangelical school in Lynchburg whose debate department is named for him.
O’Donnell was adept at coaching his students in “the ability to say something efficiently,” said Hall, who said he has also helped with his political clients. “There are a lot of debaters and a lot of candidates who can say things in a very articulate and persuasive way in a stump speech, but the time- pressures of a debate are a unique element that demand a different type of persuasion, and Brett had a very good way of teaching that.”
‘Energized and Motivated’
At debate time, students and clients could also expect “a version of a pre-game speech designed to get you energized and motivated” from O’Donnell, Hall said.
“One of Brett’s primary concerns was going to be making sure that you were focused and that you were pumped up for the debate -- really that you had good energy levels,” Hall said.
O’Donnell is no newcomer to the debate game. According to a biography on the website of his company O’Donnell and Associates Strategic Communications, he served as Liberty’s debate director for 18 years, earning the school’s team championship titles as well as his own national award in 1997 as debate coach of the year.
Bachmann a Client
After working with Bush, he coached Arizona Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican nominee. Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann hired him last year for her presidential bid, and shortly after she suspended it in January following a sixth- place finish in the Iowa caucuses, the Romney team picked O’Donnell up, Fehrnstrom said.
Romney also isn’t the first candidate to reach out to O’Donnell to help spark a quick campaign turnaround at a crucial point. When McCain’s team was worried about former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s shaky rehearsal performances in advance of a pivotal vice presidential debate with Senator Joe Biden in October 2008, McCain’s advisers dispatched O’Donnell to help her prepare.
His latest client sounds pleased with the results. As he crisscrossed Florida over the weekend making his final pitches to voters before the primary, Romney opened most of his stump speeches ribbing Gingrich about his debate performances in the state and boasting about his own.
“Those debates were fun -- wasn’t that a hoot?” Romney said yesterday at a rally in Naples. “I felt energy, just up there on the stage -- it could not have been better!”
To contact the reporter on this story: Julie Hirschfeld Davis in Pompano Beach, Florida at jdavis159@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jeanne Cummings at jcummings21@bloomberg.net
When Mitt Romney received his patriarchal blessing as a Michigan teenager, he was told that the Lord expected great things from him. All young Mormon men — the “worthy males” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as it is officially known — receive such a blessing as they embark on their requisite journeys as religious missionaries. But at 19 years of age, the youngest son of the most prominent Mormon in American politics — a seventh-generation direct descendant of one of the faith’s founding 12 apostles—Mitt Romney had been singled out as a destined leader.
From the time of his birth — March 13, 1947 — through adolescence and into manhood, the meshing of religion and politics was paramount in Mitt Romney’s life. Called “my miracle baby” by his mother, who had been told by her physician that it was impossible for her to bear a fourth child, Romney was christened Willard Mitt Romney in honor of close family friend and one of the richest Mormons in history, J. Willard Marriott.
In 1962, when Mitt — as they decided to call him — was a sophomore in high school, his father, George W. Romney, was elected governor of Michigan. Throughout the early 1960s, Mitt collected petition signatures, campaigned at his father’s side, attended strategy sessions with his father’s political advisors, and interned at his father’s office during all three of his gubernatorial terms. He attended the 1964 Republican National Convention where his father led a challenge of moderates against the right-wing Barry Goldwater. Although he was fulfilling his spiritual obligation as a Mormon missionary in France in 1968 while his father was the front-running GOP presidential candidate, Mitt was kept apprised of the political developments back in the U.S.
Upon completion of his foreign mission, he immersed himself in the 1970 senatorial campaign of his mother, Lenore Romney [ http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/romney_misled_voters_on_his_moms_abortion_stance/singleton/ ], who was running against Phillip Hart in the Michigan general election. That same year, the Cougar Club — the all male, all white social club at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City (blacks were excluded from full membership in the Mormon church until 1978) — was humming with talk that its president, Mitt Romney, would become the first Mormon president of the United States. “If not Mitt, then who?” was the ubiquitous slogan within the elite organization. The pious world of BYU was expected to spawn the man who would lead the Mormons into the White House and fulfill the prophecies of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith Jr., which Romney has avidly sought to realize.
Romney avoids mentioning it, but Smith ran for president in 1844 as an independent commander in chief of an “army of God” advocating the overthrow of the U.S. government in favor of a Mormon-ruled theocracy. Challenging Democrat James Polk and Whig Henry Clay, Smith prophesied that if the U.S. Congress did not accede to his demands that “they shall be broken up as a government and God shall damn them.” Smith viewed capturing the presidency as part of the mission of the church. He had predicted the emergence of “the one Mighty and Strong” — a leader who would “set in order the house of God” — and became the first of many prominent Mormon men to claim the mantle.
Smith’s insertion of religion into politics and his call for a “theodemocracy where God and people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteous matters” created a sensation and drew hostility from the outside world. But his candidacy was cut short when he was shot to death by an anti-Mormon vigilante mob. Out of Smith’s national political ambitions grew what would become known in Mormon circles as the “White Horse Prophecy” — a belief ingrained in Mormon culture and passed down through generations by church leaders that the day would come when the U.S. Constitution would “hang like a thread as fine as a silk fiber [ http://www.sltrib.com/lds/ci_6055090 ]” and the Mormon priesthood would save it.
Romney is the product of this culture. At BYU, he was idolized by fellow students and referred to, only half jokingly, as the “One Mighty and Strong.” He was the “alpha male” in the rarefied Cougar pack, according to Michael D. Moody, a BYU classmate and fellow member of the group. Composed almost exclusively of returned Mormon missionaries, the club members were known for their preppy blue blazers and enthusiastic athletic boosterism. Romney, who had been the assistant to the president of the French Mission where he was personally in charge of more than 200 missionaries, easily assumed a leadership position in the club.
Both political and religious, the Cougar Club raised funds for the school and its members emulated the campus-wide honor and dress codes, passionately disavowing the counterculture symbolism of long hair, bell-bottom jeans and antiwar slogans that were sweeping college campuses throughout America. They held monthly “Fireside testimonies” — Sacrament meetings at which each member testified to his belief that he lived in Heaven before being born on Earth, that he became mortal in order to usher in the latter days, and that he recognized Joseph Smith as the prophet, the Book of Mormon as the word of God, and the Mormon church as the one true faith.
Such regular testimonies encouraged the students to live devout lives and to resist the encroaching outside influences overtaking the nation at large. “It helps them cope with such external pressures as evolution-teaching professors and cranky anthropologists who expect answers that conflict with LDS teachings,” according to James Coates, author of “In Mormon Circles.”
They traditionally hosted frat-like parties (Greek fraternities were banned from the campus) to raise a few thousand dollars for the college’s sports teams. But Cougar president Romney drove the young men to aim higher, orchestrating a telethon that raised a stunning million dollars. Romney’s position as head of the club was widely seen as a calculated steppingstone for a career in national politics.
So it seemed disingenuous to his former club mates when, in a 2006 magazine interview, Romney denied his longtime political aspirations. “I have to admit I did not think I was going to be in politics,” he told the American Spectator [ http://spectator.org/archives/2006/04/21/mighty-mitt-romney/ ]. “Had I thought politics was in my future, I would not have chosen Massachusetts as the state of my residence. I would have stayed in Michigan where my Dad’s name was golden.”
Michael Moody says political success was an institutional value of the LDS church.
“The instructions in my [patriarchal] blessing, which I believed came directly from Jesus, motivated me to seek a career in government and politics,” he wrote in his 2008 book [ http://www.amazon.com/Mitt-Set-Our-People-Free/dp/0595511783 ]. Moody recently said that he ran for governor of Nevada in 1982 because he felt he had been divinely directed to “expand our kingdom” and help Romney “lead the world into the Millennium. Once a firm believer but now a church critic, Moody was indoctrinated with the White Horse Prophecy. Like Romney, Moody is a seventh-generation Mormon, steeped in the same intellectual and theological milieu.
“We were taught that America is the Promised Land,” he said in an interview.”The Mormons are the Chosen People. And the time is now for a Mormon leader to usher in the second coming of Christ and install the political Kingdom of God in Washington, D.C.”
In this scenario, Romney’s candidacy is part of the eternal plan and the candidate himself is fulfilling the destiny begun in what the church calls the “pre-existence.”
Several prominent Mormons, including conservative talk-show host Glenn Beck, have alluded to this apocalyptic prophecy. The controversial myth is not an official church doctrine, but it has also arisen in the national dialogue with the presidential candidacies of Mormons George Romney, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and now Mitt Romney.
“I don’t think the White Horse Prophecy is fair to bring up at all,” Mitt Romney told the Salt Lake Tribune [ http://www.sltrib.com/lds/ci_6055090 ] when he was asked about it during his 2008 presidential bid. “It’s been rejected by every church leader that has talked about it. It has nothing to do with anything.”
Just as the Christian fundamentalism of former GOP candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry informed their political ideology — and was therefore considered fair game [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/08/14/dominionism-michele-bachmann-and-rick-perry-s-dangerous-religious-bond.html ] in the national dialogue — so too does Mormonism define not only Mitt Romney’s character, but what kind of president he would be and what impulses would drive him in both domestic and foreign policy.
Romney’s religion is not a sideline, but a crucial element in understanding the man, the mission and the candidacy. He is the quintessential Mormon who embodies all of the basic elements of the homegrown American religion that is among the fastest growing religions [ http://www.mrm.org/fastest-growing-church ] in the world. Like his father before him, Romney has charted a course from missionary to businessman, from church bishop to politician — and to presidential candidate. The influence that Mormonism has had on him has dominated every step of the way.
The seeds of Romney’s unique brand of conservatism, often regarded with intense suspicion by most non-Mormon conservatives, were sown in the secretive, acquisitive, patriarchal, authoritarian religious empire run by “quorums” of men under an umbrella consortium called the General Authorities [ http://lds.org/church/leaders?lang=eng ]. A creed unlike any other in the United States, from its inception Mormonism encouraged material prosperity and abundance as a measure of holy worth, and its strict system of tithing 10 percent of individual wealth has made the church one of the world’s richest institutions.
A multibillion-dollar business empire that includes agribusiness, mining, insurance, electronic and print media, manufacturing, movie production, commercial real estate, defense contracting, retail stores and banking, the Mormon church has unprecedented economic and political power. Despite a solemn stricture against any act or tolerance of gambling, Mormons have been heavily invested and exceptionally influential in the Nevada gaming industry since the great expansion of modern Las Vegas in the 1950s. Valued for their unquestioning loyalty to authority as well as general sobriety — they are prohibited from imbibing in alcohol, tobacco or coffee — Mormons have long been recruited into top positions in government agencies and multinational corporations. They are prominent in such institutions as the CIA, FBI and the national nuclear weapons laboratories, giving the church a sphere of influence unlike any other American religion in the top echelons of government.
Romney, like his father before him who voluntarily tithed an unparalleled 19 percent of his personal fortune, is among the church’s wealthiest members. And like his father, grandfather and great-grandfathers before him, Mitt Romney was groomed for a prominent position in the church, which he manifested first as a missionary, then as a bishop, and then as a stake president, becoming the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston — the equivalent of a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
Called a “militant millennial movement” by renowned Mormon historian David L. Bigler, Mormonism’s founding theology was based upon a literal takeover of the U.S. government. In light of the theology and divine prophecies of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, unamended by the LDS hierarchy, it would seem that the office of the American presidency is the ultimate ecclesiastical position to which a Mormon leader might aspire. So it is not the LDS cosmology that is relevant to Romney’s candidacy, but whether devout 21st-century Mormons like Romney believe that the American presidency is also a theological position.
Since his first campaign in 2008, Romney has attempted to keep debate about his religion out of the political discourse. The issue is not whether there is a religious test for political office; the Constitution prohibits it. Instead, the question is whether, past all of the flip-flops on virtually every policy, he has an underlying religious conception of the presidency and the American government. At the recent GOP presidential debate in Florida, Romney professed that the Declaration of Independence is a theological document, not specific to the rebellious 13 colonies, but establishing a covenant “between God and man.” Which would suggest that Mitt Romney views the American presidency as a theological office.
Sally Denton is the author most recently of "American Massacre" and is currently working on "Betrayal at the Border: Profit, Death, and the American Dream."
Photo-illustration by Darrow (Photo: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images)
His greatest passion is something he’s determined to keep secret.
By Frank Rich Published Jan 29, 2012
Back in the thick of the 2008 Republican presidential race, I asked a captain of American finance what he had made of Mitt Romney when they were young colleagues at Bain & Company. “Mitt was a nice guy, a smart businessman, and an excellent team player,” he responded without missing a beat. Then came the CEO’s one footnote, delivered with bemusement, not pique: “Still, whenever the rest of us would go out at the end of the day, we’d always find ourselves having the same conversation: None of us had any idea who this guy was.”
Here we are in 2012, and nothing has changed. What Romney’s former colleague observed of the young Mitt at close range decades ago could stand as the judgment of most Americans watching him at a cable-news remove now. That’s why his campaign has so often been on the ropes. That’s why, in a highly polarized nation, the belief that Romney is a phony may be among the very last convictions still bringing left, right, and center together. As a focus-group participant evocatively told pollster Peter Hart [ http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/02/news/la-pn-gop-focus-group-20111202 ] in November, Romney reminded him of the “dad who’s never home.” Nonetheless, this phantom has spent most of the campaign as the “presumed” front-runner for his party’s nomination. Amazingly, this conventional wisdom held up throughout 2011, even though 75 percent of Romney’s own party was searching so frantically for an alternative that Donald Trump enjoyed a nanosecond bump in the polls [ http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2011/04/trump-takes-lead.html ].
Now much of the 75 percent has identified the non-Mitt candidate who really does express where the GOP is today. Newt Gingrich is proud to stir a dollop of race into the vitriol he hurls at Barack Obama, “the food-stamp president [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2011/08/05/gingrich_obama_most_effective_food_stamp_president_in_history.html ].” He’s a human Vesuvius at spewing populist anger at all elites; attacks by the press or by Republican Establishment talking heads like Karl Rove and Joe Scarborough only make him stronger. And unlike any other GOP leader, he can boast that he actually realized the tea party’s goal of shutting the government down. The morning after Newt shut Mitt down in South Carolina, Rich Lowry, the editor of the pro-Mitt, anti-Newt National Review, channeled the horror of GOP grandees everywhere. “If Romney can’t right himself,” he wrote [ http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/why_gingrich_and_gop_pols_fears_715Men9k32QChZiR59QDoO ], then “every major elected Republican in the country will panic” and “every unlikely scenario to get another candidate in the race will be explored.” The names once again being floated—Mitch Daniels! Jeb Bush! Paul Ryan! Bobby Jindal!—have not been known to raise the pulse rate of anyone beyond the 25 percent of the GOP embodied by elite conservative pundits in Washington and New York [ http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/candidate-gop-pundit-2012-1/ ].
What’s more likely is that the party’s panicked Establishment, and its Wall Street empire, will succeed in their push to crush Gingrich and prop up Romney in any way they can. They still see Mitt as the best available front man for the radical party the Republicans have become—the dutiful Eagle Scout who can hold down the fort as the right’s self-styled revolutionary rabble threaten to overwhelm today’s GOP elites the way the Goldwater insurgents once did Nelson Rockefeller and Romney’s father, George. Some of the same Beltway types who have reinforced Mitt’s presumed victory march since last summer believe he can be rebooted for the fall merely with some stern course correction.
For four years now, Republicans have been demonizing Barack Obama for his alleged “otherness”—trashing him as a less-than-real American pushing “anti-colonial,” socialist, and possibly Islamist ideas gleaned from a rogue’s gallery of subversive influences led by his Kenyan father, Saul Alinsky, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And yet Romney is in some ways more exotic and more removed from “real America” than Obama ever was, his gleaming white camouflage notwithstanding. Romney is white, all right, but he’s a white shadow. He can come across like an android who’s been computer-generated to be the perfect genial candidate. When forced to interact with actual people, he tries hard, but his small talk famously takes the form of guessing a voter’s age or nationality [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/us/politics/a-new-romney-seeking-to-connect-reveals-some-quirks.html?pagewanted=all ] (usually incorrectly) or offering a greeting of “Congratulations!” for no particular reason. Richard Nixon was epically awkward too, but he could pass (in Tom Wicker’s phrase) as “one of us.” Unlike Nixon’s craggy face, or, for that matter, Gingrich’s, Romney’s does not look lived in. His eyes don’t show the mileage of a veteran fighter’s journey through triumphs and hard knocks—the profile that Americans prefer to immaculate perfection in a leader during tough times. Even at Mitt’s most human, he resembles George Hamilton [ http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_7C0gSvTcf58/TAVyOk0hXyI/AAAAAAAAB5Y/HuT0KELKnwU/s1600/Books+George+Hamilton.jpg ] without the self-deprecating humor or the perma-tan.
That missing human core, that inauthenticity and inability to connect, has been a daily complaint about Romney. To flesh out the brief, critics usually turn to his blatant political opportunism and rarefied upbringing—his history of ideological about-faces and his cakewalk as the prep-school-burnished, Harvard-educated son of a fabled auto executive. But the hollowness of Romney is not merely a function of his craven surrender to the rightward tilt of the modern GOP or the patrician blind spots he acquired at too many fancy schools and palatial country clubs. If that were the case, he’d pass for another Bush, and receive some of the love that Bush father and son earned from the party faithful in their salad days. Some think he can get there by learning better performance skills: As Chuck Todd of NBC News put it, he “has to learn how to connect, how to speak emotionally … more from the heart.” If Nixon could learn how to sell himself in 1968 under the tutelage of Roger Ailes, and Bush 41 could receive coaching from the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler in 1980, there might still be hope for Romney under the instruction of, say, Kelsey Grammer. But Romney is too odd, too much a mystery man. We don’t know his history the way we did Nixon’s and Bush’s. His otherness seems not a matter of style and pedigree but existential.
We don’t know who Romney is for the simple reason that he never reveals who he is. Even when he is not lying about his history—whether purporting to have been “a hunter pretty much all my life [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wHWPJOuq4U ]” (in 2007) or to being a denizen of “the real streets of America [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAlmsbwrY3E ]” (in 2012)—he is incredibly secretive about almost everything that makes him tick. He has been in hiding throughout his stints in both the private and public sectors. While his career-long refusal to release his tax returns [ http://thinkprogress.org/progress-report/does-mitt-romney-have-something-to-hide/ ] was damaging in itself, it resonated even more so as a proxy for all the other secrets he has kept and still keeps.
Just as Republican caucus votes were being (re-)counted in Iowa, the first serious and thorough Romney biography was published, to deservedly favorable reviews. The authors, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, are Boston Globe investigative reporters who have tracked him for years. Their book, The Real Romney [ http://www.amazon.com/Real-Romney-Michael-Kranish/dp/0062123270 ], is manifestly fair and nonpartisan, giving him full credit for his drive and smarts as a pioneer in the entrepreneurial realm of private equity. But it’s a measure of how much voters view Romney as a nonentity that they have shown so little interest in reading it. Not even a rave in the Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/books/the-real-romney-by-michael-kranish-and-scott-helman-review.html?pagewanted=all ] the week before the South Carolina primary could catapult The Real Romney into the top 500 of the Amazon list, despite the serious possibility that its protagonist could be the next president of the United States.
The book has no bombshells, and the very lack of them is revealing. For all the encyclopedic detail its authors amassed, and all the sources they mined, their subject remains impenetrable. “A wall. A shell. A mask,” they write at the outset, listing the terms used by many who “have known or worked with Romney” and view him as “a man who sometimes seems to be looking not into your eyes but past them.” Former business and political colleagues are in agreement that he has scant interest in mingling with people in even casual social interactions (in a hallway, for instance) and displays “little desire to know who people are.” He so “rarely went out with the guys in any social venue” that one business associate dubbed him the Tin Man for “his inability to bond.” During his one term as governor of Massachusetts, Romney was inaccessible to legislators, with ropes and elevator settings often restricting access to his suite of offices. He was notorious, one lawmaker explained, for having “no idea what our names were—none.” A longtime Republican, after watching Romney’s vacuous, failed senatorial campaign against Teddy Kennedy in 1994, came to the early conclusion that Mitt’s “main cause appeared to be himself.” This was borne out in 2006, when Romney spent more than 200 days out of Massachusetts ginning up a presidential run rather than attending to his duties as the state’s chief executive.
Aside from his ability to build Bain Capital and pile up profits there, Romney has remarkably few visible accomplishments to show for his 64 years. He can’t prove that he actually generated any jobs as a venture capitalist (beyond those at Bain itself), which is why he constantly revises the number of jobs [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/debate-fact-check-romneys-120000-jobs/ ] he claims to have created (or, as he carefully hedges it, “helped create”). His sole achievement as governor was the Massachusetts prototype for the Obama health-care law—a feat he now alternately fudges or runs away from. The state’s record of job creation on his watch was the fourth worst of the 50 states.
Known for being frugal to a fault, Romney does not seem to particularly relish spending his fortune. He likes data, and his piles of dollars seem to be mainly markers to keep score of his success. Though he now tries to wrap himself in Main Street brands like Staples and Domino’s Pizza that passed through Bain’s clutches, he was not intellectually or managerially engaged in the businesses that Bain bought and sold; he didn’t run any of them. He seems to have no cultural passions beyond his and his wife’s first-date movie, The Sound of Music. He is not a sportsman or conspicuous sports fan. His only real, nonnumerical passions seem to be his photogenic, intact family, which he wields like a weapon [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvxDzS7B774 ] whenever an opponent with multiple marriages like John McCain or Gingrich looms into view—and, of course, his faith.
That faith is key to the Romney mystery. Had the 2002 Winter Olympics not been held in Salt Lake City, and not been a major civic project of Mormon leaders there, it’s unlikely Romney would have gotten involved. (Whether his involvement actually prompted a turnaround [ http://spydrasweb.blogspot.com/2012/01/usoc-olympic-mitt.html ] of that initially troubled enterprise, as he claims, is a subject of debate.) But Romney is even less forthcoming about his religion than he is about his tax returns. When the Evangelical view of Mormonism as a non-Christian cult threatened his 2008 run, Romney delivered what his campaign hyped as a JFK-inspired speech on “Faith in America [ http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/politics/06text-romney.html?pagewanted=all ].” This otherwise forgotten oration was memorable only for the number of times it named Romney’s own faith: once.
In the current campaign, Romney makes frequent reference to faith, God, and his fierce loyalty to “the same church.” But whether in debates, or in the acres of official material on his campaign website, or in a flyer pitched at religious voters in South Carolina, he never names what that faith or church is. In Romneyland, Mormonism is the religion that dare not speak its name. Which leaves him unable to talk about the very subject he seems to care about most, a lifelong source of spiritual, familial, and intellectual sustenance. We’re used to politicians who camouflage their real views about issues, or who practice fraud in their backroom financial and political deal-making, but this is something else. Romney’s very public persona feels like a hoax because it has been so elaborately contrived to keep his core identity under wraps.
His campaign is intent on enforcing the redaction of his religion, not least, one imagines, because a Gallup poll found [ http://www.gallup.com/poll/148100/hesitant-support-mormon-2012.aspx ] that 22 percent in both parties say they would not vote for a Mormon for president. (Only 5 percent admit feeling that way about an African-American.) A senior adviser explained the strategy [ http://books.google.com/books?id=we9zT09jj-oC&lpg=PT39&ots=yHq3ckDY9T&dq=Politico%20RB%20religious%20bigot&pg=PT39#v=onepage&q&f=false ] of deflecting any discussion of Romney’s Mormon life to Politico: “Someone takes a shot at the governor’s faith, we put a scarlet letter on them, RB, religious bigot.” Good luck with that. Like Romney’s evasions about his private finances, his conspicuous cone of silence about this major pillar of his biography also leaves you wondering what he is trying to hide. That his faith can be as secretive as he is—Ann Romney’s non-Mormon parents were not allowed to attend the religious ceremony consecrating her marriage to Mitt—only whets the curiosity among the 82 percent of Americans who tell pollsters they know little or nothing about Mormonism.
Weeks before his death, Christopher Hitchens, no more a fan of LDS than of any other denomination, wrote that “we are fully entitled” to ask Romney [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/10/is_mormonism_a_cult_who_cares_it_s_their_weird_and_sinister_beli.html ] about the role of his religion in influencing his political formation. Of course we are. Romney is not merely a worshipper sitting in the pews but the scion of a family dynasty integral to the progress of an American-born faith that has played a large role in the public square. Since his youthful stint as a missionary, he has served LDS in a variety of significant posts [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/01/mitt-romney-sent-millions-to-mormon-church/ ]. The answers to questions about Romney’s career as a lay church official may tell us more about who he is than his record at Bain, his sparse tenure as governor, or his tax returns.
The questions are not theological. Nor are they about polygamy, the scandalous credo that earlier Romneys practiced even after the church banned it in 1890. Rather, the questions are about the Mormon church’s political actions during Mitt Romney’s lifetime—and about what role Romney, as both a leader and major donor, might have played or is still playing in those actions. To ask these questions is not to be a religious bigot but to vet a candidate for the nation’s highest job. Given how often Romney himself cites his faith as a defining force in his life, voters have a right to know what role he played when his faith intersected with the secular lives of his fellow citizens.
As we learn in The Real Romney, Mitt Romney has performed many admirable acts of charity for members of his church in dire straits. But the flip side of this hands-on engagement is whether, in his various positions in the church, he countenanced or enforced its discriminatory treatment of blacks and women, practices it only started to end in earnest well after he had entered adulthood. It wasn’t until 1978, when he was in his thirties, that blacks were given full status in his church—an embarrassing fact that Romney tried to finesse in his last campaign by speaking emotionally on Meet the Press of seeing his father join Martin Luther King [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8GpZnJbjz4 ] on a civil-rights march. (The Boston Phoenix would soon report [ http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/53200-was-it-all-a-dream/ ] that this was another lie about his past.) In the seventies, Romney’s church also applied its institutional muscle to battling the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment for women. And these days, no major faith puts more money where its mouth is in battling civil rights for gay Americans. Its actions led Stuart Matis, a faithful graduate of Brigham Young University who’d completed his missionary service, to commit suicide on the steps of a Mormon chapel [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2000/05/07/to-be-gay-and-mormon.html ] in 2000 in anguished protest of his dehumanized status within his religion. Unchastened, the Mormon church enlisted its congregants to put over Proposition 8 in California [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/15/us/politics/15marriage.html?pagewanted=all ] in 2008. Mormons contributed more than $20 million to the effort and constituted an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the campaign’s original volunteers. Romney, who endorsed gay rights when running as a moderate against Kennedy in 1994, has swung so far in the other direction that he ridiculed gay couples [ http://thinkprogress.org/lgbt/2012/01/17/405214/in-private-meeting-with-gay-leaders-romney-compared-lgbt-equality-to-fathers-fight-for-civil-rights/ ] when pandering to South Carolina Republicans a few years ago. (“Some are actually having children born to them!” he said with horror.) Did some of his yet undivulged Mormon philanthropy support the Prop 8 campaign?
Even if these questions yield benign answers, we know that Romney’s faith has contributed to his self-segregation from the actual “real streets of America.” His closest circle comes from within his faith, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the fact remains that today the American Mormon population is still only 1 percent black. (Those recent television promo spots marketing LDS as a fount of diversity are a smoke screen.) Much as the isolating cocoon of Romney’s wealth can lead him to dismiss $347,327 in speaking fees [ http://motherjones.com/mojo/2012/01/mitt-romney-speaking-fees-newt-gingrich ] as “not very much” (to take just one recent example of his cluelessness about how the other 99 percent lives), so the demographic isolation imposed by his religion takes its own political toll. When he’s forced to interact with the America beyond his hermetically sealed Mormon orbit, we get instant YouTube classics like his attempt to get down and rap with black voters on Martin Luther King Day four years ago by quoting “Who Let the Dogs Out? [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDwwAaVmnf4 ]”
*
Given Romney’s maladroitness as a retail politician, the failure of even his own fans to convey any enthusiasm for him, and the 75 percent of his party that questions his conservatism, it’s hard to fathom how he kept being judged inevitable by so many observers just as he was losing two of the first three election-year contests. Even a normally hardheaded, data-driven analyst like the Times’ poll maven Nate Silver couldn’t resist being swept up by this narrative, going beyond the numbers to write in a January 16 post [ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/national-polls-suggest-romney-is-overwhelming-favorite-for-g-o-p-nomination/ ] that the 90 percent odds given a Romney nomination by the betting market Intrade “may if anything be too conservative.” (Six days later, after South Carolina, Silver wrote, “Perhaps, then, there is profound resistance among Republican voters to nominating Mr. Romney after all.”) Much of the Romney inflation, naturally, has to do with his good fortune in having such a splintered and screwy scrum of opponents. Often we’re told that he “looks like a president” (that would be a pre-Obama president). We also hear constantly about his message discipline, his organization, and his money—attributes that matter more to political consultants and the pundits who pal around with them than to an angry electorate trying to dig out of a recession. To the political class, Romney is the most electable candidate because his mealy-mouthed blandness is what will lure that much-apotheosized yet indistinct band of moderates and independents to his side. But as Michael Kinsley long ago joked that Al Gore was an old person’s idea of a young person, so Mitt Romney is a political hack’s idea of an electable conservative president. Voters may have another view, and certainly did in South Carolina, where exit polls found that those who most valued a candidate’s electability rallied to Newt [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577175480758093506.html ].
But if the power of Mitt’s money and the power of pack journalism helped contribute to his status as indestructible, the power of denial at the higher reaches of the GOP did even more so. The Republican Establishment has been adamant in insisting that economic populism and class warfare do not infect their own ranks, and that economic inequality is strictly a lefty and Democratic gripe. If that’s the case, then Romney’s strong identification with the one percent stigmatized by Occupy Wall Street would indeed present no problem. But a January Pew poll found [ http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/01/11/rising-share-of-americans-see-conflict-between-rich-and-poor/ ] that a majority of both Republicans and Independents now join Democrats in feeling that there are “strong conflicts” between the rich and poor in America; a recent NBC News–Wall Street Journal survey found that Republican voters were just as likely as Democrats to blame “Wall Street bankers” [ http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12022/1204880-372-0.stm ] most of all for the country’s economic problems. It’s hardly a stretch that some of that blame might attach itself to Romney, especially after Gingrich turned a spotlight on his Bain résumé.
When the battle over Bain broke out in New Hampshire, both the Romney campaign and the right were blindsided. “Perhaps the most striking thing about the current fight over Mitt Romney’s career in private equity is how little we knew about it,” wrote Byron York [ http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/york-if-romney-wins-count-obama-dig-bain/310911 ], the conservative columnist at the Washington Examiner, adding that Romney’s “business experience has not been the topic of long and detailed public examination and debate.” He, like many of his cohort in the Fox echo chamber, seemed unaware that Romney’s Bain record has been debated for nearly two decades, starting with his 1994 battle with Kennedy (who engaged “truth squads” of downsized workers from a midwestern Bain-owned company [ http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/obama-economy/randy-johnson/ ] to stalk Romney). That record has been examined repeatedly by mainstream journalists ever since.
Even as the Republican Establishment continues to prop up Mitt, it remains in denial about his long-term prospects. Romney rationalizers argue that Gingrich’s blunderbuss assault on Bain was a blessing in disguise, for it will force Romney to come up with an airtight defense before the fall. But Romney has been trying since 1994 to formulate answers to questions about his Bain career, his vast wealth, and his leadership role in his church. If he hasn’t found them by now, it’s because he doesn’t have them. And so his preferred route has been just to avoid tough questions altogether—and confrontation in general—by sticking to manicured campaign events as immaculate as his Brooks Brothers shirts. He tries to shun mainstream-news-organization interviews, and dropped the “Ask Mitt Anything” sessions with voters that were a staple of his 2008 campaign. Even straightforward interviews with sympathetic interlocutors like Fox News’s Bret Baier [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Vu1JO5AHQ ] and the radio talk-show host Laura Ingraham [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6KGwvvTwIM ] throw him into a tizzy, if not a hissy fit. Remarkably, he received high marks for months for his steady demeanor and discipline in the Republican debates, but as we now know, all it takes is a tough question about his own biography to prompt a stammering answer and robotic herky-jerky head movements suggestive of a human-size Pez dispenser. His belated efforts to go on the attack against Gingrich often make him sound like an adolescent tattletale. In Romney’s best debate, last Thursday, he was still outshone by the also-ran Rick Santorum.
To escape the twin taints of Bain and his one-percenter’s under–15 percent tax rate, some Republican elders are urging Romney to “stake his campaign on something larger and far more important than his own business expertise [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108500491449164.html ]” (The Wall Street Journal editorial page) or, as Fred Barnes suggested [ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204257504577154932854776186.html ] more baldly, to find “a bigger idea to deflect attention from Bain.” But even Mitt’s own spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, once described him (to the Des Moines Register) as “not a very notional leader [ http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/romney-leadership.htm ].” Romney is incapable of an arresting turn of phrase, let alone a fresh idea. Running on empty, he resorts to filling out his canned campaign orations with lengthy recitations of the lyrics from patriotic anthems. (“Believe in America” is his campaign slogan.) Take away the bogus boasts about “job creation” at Bain and the disowned Romneycare, and what else is there to Mitt Romney? Mainly, his unspecified service to his church and his perfect marriage. That reduces him to the stature of the Republican presidential candidate he most resembles, Thomas Dewey—in both his smug and wooden campaign style and in the overrating of his prospects by the political culture. Even the famously dismissive description of Dewey popularized by the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth—as “the little man on the wedding cake [ http://books.google.com/books?id=c4UoX6-Sv1AC&lpg=PA414&ots=V1yl6wpwGt&dq=Dewey%20little%20man%20on%20the%20wedding%20cake&pg=PA414#v=onepage&q&f=false ]”—seems to fit Mitt.
No Republican has ever won the nomination after losing the South Carolina primary. No incumbent president since FDR has won reelection with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent on Election Day, and ours currently stands at 8.5 percent. No candidate with a 58 percent disapproval rating—especially Newt—is likely to win a national election, even for dogcatcher. But surely someone has to be nominated by the Republicans, and someone has to win in November.
“This race is getting to be even more interesting,” said Romney when conceding to Gingrich [ http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/4438 ] in South Carolina. As always, it’s impossible to know whether he really meant what he said or not, but this much is certain: He will continue to be the least interesting thing about it.
Much unsaid as Mitt Romney cites his tie to Mexico
Mitt Romney spoke at a rally in Dunedin, Fla., yesterday. David L. Ryan/Globe Staff
By Michael Kranish | Globe Staff January 31, 2012
MIAMI - Mitt Romney, who rarely discusses his ancestry, has repeated a striking comment in Florida in recent days to soften his rhetoric about immigration and woo the crucial Hispanic voting bloc.
“My dad was born in Mexico,’’ Romney says at many campaign stops, as he expresses empathy and solidarity with immigrant families. It follows sharp rhetoric in places such as Iowa, where he decried what he called efforts to provide “amnesty’’ to the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants.
The story of Romney’s father, George, is one that many Cuban-Americans can relate to in this city of immigrants: A revolution sweeps through the homeland, prompting an exodus of people who, in many cases, left behind everything to come to the United States. But in this case, George Romney’s country of birth was Mexico, not Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
The issue of immigration is especially sensitive in Florida, where Hispanics make up 11 percent of the Republican primary electorate, and could provide the key to victory in today’s primary. Romney’s chief challenger, Newt Gingrich, has called Romney anti-immigrant; Romney said the charge was repulsive.
It is in this context that Romney has mentioned that he is the child of a born-in-Mexico father. But he usually ends the story there, failing to explain the circumstances or, even more strikingly, why it might be relevant to those he is trying to win over.
Were he to tell the rest of the story, it doubtless would resonate with many here: George Romney was born in Mexico and was 5 years old when a revolution forced his family members in 1912 to flee their Mormon colony and seek refuge in the United States. The Mormon exiles lost their homes, farms, and most of their belongings, were welcomed by the United States, and benefited from a $100,000 refugee fund established by Congress.
But there are other elements to the Romney story that may explain why he doesn’t tell the full tale on the campaign trail. The reason that George was born in Mexico is that his grandfather - Mitt’s great-grandfather - had taken refuge there in order to escape US laws against polygamy. It was this family patriarch, Miles Park Romney, who established the colony and lived there with four wives.
Mitt Romney has decried what he has called the “awful’’ practice of polygamy and has never visited the colony, even though several dozen of his cousins continue to live there.
Romney’s new emphasis on his father’s roots drew the attention yesterday of a host on “Fox and Friends,’’ who said during an interview with Romney that it was the first time he had heard the former Massachusetts governor discuss that aspect of his ancestry.
Asked whether the discussion was “helping you with the Latino community in Florida,’’ Romney responded, “You know, I wish I could claim that I’m Hispanic and that would help me in the Latino community here in Florida and around the country, but my dad was born of American parents living in Mexico. So he was Anglo at the time and yet, I’m very proud of the fact that he came to this country at a critical time, was helped to get on his feet by folks in this country.’’
Romney has often declared his support for legal immigrants and said he would not try to round up those here illegally. Instead, he said he favored “self-deportation,’’ which Gingrich called a fantasy, but which Romney hopes will send a message to the Hispanic community here that he would not act precipitously.
Gingrich has cast himself slightly to the left of Romney on the issue, but Romney’s recent softening of his message may have blurred the distinction. Both men now say, for example, that they would support granting citizenship to certain illegal immigrants if they served in the US military, but they oppose a broader plan known as the Dream Act.
But even the muted rhetoric may not have gone far enough for some in the Republican Party who fear losing Hispanic support in the general election. Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida whose wife was born in Mexico and who has not endorsed any candidate, recently told The Wall Street Journal that Republicans must moderate their rhetoric about immigration.
“The tone of our message is one of ‘them and us’ sometimes,’’ he said.
Romney’s discussion of his father’s Mexican birth has prompted rounds of discussion in online forums about how his father, when he ran for president in 1968, could have met the constitutional requirement that a president be a “natural-born citizen.’’
In George Romney’s case, representatives of his 1968 presidential campaign argued that he fit the constitutional requirement because George’s parents, who had gone back and forth from the United States to Mexico, were US citizens.
Accounts published during the campaign indicate that questions were beginning to be raised, but the matter became moot when George Romney dropped out of the race.
A Congressional Research Report published last November that explores the issue said the Constitution did not define what it means to be a “natural-born citizen,’’ and notes that competing views were expressed when George Romney declared his candidacy.
Seth Lipsky, the author of “The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide,’’ said that “in most past cases, Congress and the courts have been reluctant to open up doubts raised about candidates, and I think this reluctance is wise.’’
Mike Romney, a cousin of Mitt’s who lives in the Mexican colony established by their great-grandfather, welcomed his cousin’s new ancestral emphasis. “I am glad to hear that he is at least mentioning a bit of his Mexican roots,’’ Mike Romney said via e-mail.
Wealthy More Likely to Lie, Cheat 2/27/12 The “upper class,” as defined by the study, were more likely to break the law while driving, take candy from children, lie in negotiation, cheat to increase their odds of winning a prize and endorse unethical behavior at work, researchers reported today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2012-02-27/wealthy-more-likely-to-lie-cheat [with comments]
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