Littwin: Romney's 'there' hard to glean

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, June 18, 2007

MANCHESTER, N.H. - One thing you learn quickly out here on the campaign trail: When they say Mitt Romney is too good to be true, they rarely mean it as a compliment.

When they say his hair is perfect, you can be sure they're not really talking about his perfect hair.

When short and balding (his description, not mine) Tom Tancredo says that Romney - tall, tan and square of jaw - looks like a candidate straight out of central casting, he means just that: that he looks like a candidate straight out of central casting.

Romney is suddenly very hot. John McCain looks like he's fading, at least for now, under the weight of Iraq and immigration. Rudy Giuliani looks like he's worried about playing in the early primary states. Fred Thompson, the new Republican flavor, has been labeled by candidate Mike Huckabee as the Mighty Mouse candidate. "You know," he says, "here I come to save the day." But Thompson remains unbloodied.

Romney, meanwhile, is running as the successful CEO Republican; in other words, the one who's not George Bush. The one who likes to talk more about trade with China than death in Iraq. But if he's hot, he's no hotter than the attention he's getting, most of which follows a familiar story line - similar to the one that closely followed another recent Massachusetts presidential candidate.

And so, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes that Romney is so "counterfeit" that if "he were a coin, a vending machine would spit him out," and Time columnist Joe Klein writes "there isn't the slightest hint of courage or conviction in his stump act." You get the center-left conventional wisdom on Romney as the plastic candidate.

And John McCain's campaign reportedly owns a mittvsfacts.com Web site. McCain says now he won't use the Web site, but he'll still point to Romney's, uh, inconsistencies.

And when Rep. Barney Frank, the liberal sound-bite machine from Massachusetts, says Romney, the former moderate-sounding governor of Massachusetts, is "the most intellectually dishonest human being in the history of politics," you know all bets are off.

The arguments will undoubtedly dog Romney as long as he's in the campaign. On Friday, when Romney went to talk to the National Right to Life group, ABC News had a story up on its Web site about the timeline on Romney's "epiphany" during a conversation about stem cells that caused him to change his public stance on women's right to choose abortion. Here's the headline: Romney's Pro-Life Conversion: Myth or Reality?

I had been at Romney campaign headquarters in Boston to ask Tagg Romney - the oldest of five Romney sons and one who looks alarmingly like you'd expect a Romney to look - about his father and about whether looking too good to be true can be a problem.

He laughed and said maybe the campaign should put a scar on his face, like Al Pacino in the movie.

Tagg left a marketing job with the Los Angeles Dodgers to help run his father's campaign. It's in the blood. There's a photo on his office wall, not far from the autographed photo of Ted Williams, of his father and grandfather during his grandfather's 1968 presidential campaign. He knows the real issue here.

"I bring someone who's a character witness," Tagg says. "Since I know him, I can tell people that his positions are genuine. That not only is he a good leader, he's a good man."

This is the preferred story line. The five brothers have a blog that sometimes pokes wholesome, Osmond-family fun at Dad. When Romney used the phrase "null set" twice at a debate, Tagg changed the campaign tennis team's name from Romney Tannenbaums to the Null Setters.

Charlie Manning, who has been with Romney on all his campaigns, was out front on the flip-flop issue. "You read stories that he changed his mind on abortion and changed his mind on gay marriage. He was always against gay marriage. Even Teddy (Kennedy) was against gay marriage then (in their 1994 senatorial race). One writer writes something and another one picks it up . . . Look closely at the record."

I'm looking closely. And, in a wide-open race, everyone has reason to be nervous.

It's Romney's fifth campaign stop of the day, a New Hampshire GOP presidential gala. It's not as gala as it could be. Romney is the only major candidate to show. Tancredo is manning the anti-amnesty booth. Duncan Hunter is shaking hands.

And Romney, 12 hours into his day, bounds to the stage. He's got the square jaw and $350 million in the bank and, at 60, he still bounds.

You can see why he's upbeat. Suddenly, he's leading in the polls here in New Hampshire and in Iowa. The money is still flowing in. Giuliani and McCain have pulled out of the August Iowa straw poll - apparently to save money and to save face. Thompson is in the wings, auditioning.

And so, Romney, who always seems to move in a hurry, has reason to rush to the stage. It could be because Romney can't wait, in that back-to-Pleasantville style of his, to introduce his wife, Ann, of 38 years - each year seeming like a direct shot at thrice-married Giuliani.

Or maybe it's this: As one campaign aide says to me, this energy is what comes of a lifetime of not smoking or drinking. He likes to talk about the three-legged stool of Republican values - military, economic and family values. He makes it clear that Giuliani has only two legs on his stool.

In any case, Romney goes to the microphone and tells a joke, the same joke he has told at each stop that day, in which he asks Ann about his presidential run and whether "in her wildest dreams" she ever thought any of this was possible. He says her reply is this: "Mitt, you weren't in my wildest dreams."

It's not much of a joke, and you're pretty sure that the real punch line is that everyone involved with Team Romney has had this not-so-wild dream for a while. Romney is the son of a famous businessman-governor who nearly became the Republican presidential nominee in 1968, meaning that, with a little luck, we wouldn't have had Richard Nixon to kick around. Romney, the son, entered politics by running against Ted Kennedy in 1994 and actually gave him a brief scare. Ask yourself: Who picks a Kennedy for his first opponent?

After saving the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City - this is a consensus opinion - Romney returned to Massachusetts to knock off a weakened Republican governor. And now he's running for president 40 years after his father, at the same age as his father. The story of fathers and sons, though, goes only so far.

Manning, the Romney insider, tells the story of meeting George Romney back in '94 and how the elder Romney told him of one Michigan event, back in the '60s, where he was being heckled and that he pulled off his jacket, jumped off the stage and chased the guy out of the building. "I can't imagine Mitt doing that," he says.

The parallels are too obvious to pass up. Their careers - business to governor to presidential candidate - look more than casually similar. But, in many ways, George Romney may have been closer to a John McCain model than to a Mitt Romney. The elder Romney took on fellow Republicans on civil rights. The elder Romney chased the heckler.

Romney famously lost that 1968 race after saying he had been "brainwashed" by generals in Vietnam. The lessons of the fathers . . .

Mitt Romney routinely is accused of being too packaged. George Romney, no one has to remind Mitt Romney, lost.

I am talking to Steve Crosby, who's dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He's a Republican who worked in the Jane Swift administration when she was the acting governor. Romney upstaged Swift, who decided not to run against him in the primary, so there might be hard feelings here.

"He's an immensely capable man," Crosby says of Romney. "He might be a great president. The problem is, I don't know what he'd do as a president. I don't know where the 'there' is. What does he stand for? I don't have a clue."

Crosby said Romney was consistent early in his career as a moderate Republican. But he says Romney saw an opportunity to draw national attention, and that, as a businessman who made hundreds of millions of dollars recognizing opportunities, he couldn't resist.

There was certainly opportunity. The Massachusetts Supreme Court stunned everyone by making gay marriage legal. There was the stem-cell debate. The Democratic National Convention came to Boston. And, of course, there was John Kerry to counter. Crosby says it was all about "profit maximization."

"That's the world he's from," Crosby says. "You shred everything that gets in the way of profit maximization, and you flip it for maximum return. In the business world, that's considered a great thing. In the political world, there are trade-offs."

Crosby says he was reluctant to talk about this until he was listening to an NPR story one day about Romney's anti-Massachusetts campaign ad. Romney was appealing directly to Southern social-conservative voters who might worry about him being a Mormon.

"He's insulting Massachusetts for its liberalness," he says. "He ridicules Massachusetts voters for their liberal views. Yet it was their, quote, liberal views that made them so open-minded to judge him on his apparent merits and not on his religion. And now he's trying to persuade people concerned about his religion by dumping on the people who didn't care . . . It's opportunism in the extreme. And the irony is, I don't think he sees it."

Of course, there's irony and there's irony. Republicans have been demonizing Massachusetts from at least the time of Mike Dukakis. You know how Massachusetts Democrats fare in these things: Kennedy, Tsongas, Dukakis, Kerry.

But Manning thinks a Republican from blue, blue Massachusetts is a different game. Not that Republicans don't win there. Running against a heavily Democratic legislature, they had a 16-year reign until Deval Patrick won last year.

"For a lot of people it's very intriguing," Manning says. "He's been a Republican in Massachusetts, where less than 13 percent of the voters are Republican. Think about this. All of the first women to become major figures came from parties on the other side. Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Ghandi, Benazir Bhutto."

So, I say, he's the American Indira Ghandi? He laughs.

"More like Maggie Thatcher," he says.

Romney is speaking at an Ask Mitt Anything event. His staff says he loves doing these, and you can see why. He makes it looks easy. First he apologizes to the audience for the ask-anything concept, hoping no one finds it "arrogant." Then he provides easy answers to hard questions. He thanks every questioner, usually before he answers and after, and wants no one to go away unhappy.

I thought of Bob Shrum on John Edwards when he first met him - that he was a Clinton who hadn't read the books. I thought of Romney as a Bush who had read the books, and - as a guy who went to Harvard Business School and Harvard Law simultaneously - could ace the test.

I asked him about immigration. He had praised an earlier iteration of immigration reform. He opposes the new bill, calling it amnesty. Repeatedly. At every stop. I ask what he'd do with the 12 million who are here, and, he says, with enforcement they would go home. I asked him how long it would take. He dodged. I asked him how many would leave. He feinted.

It's early in the race, but even so, Romney is comfortable dealing in generalities. He talks about "Islamic jihadists" and "evil in the world," but not much about Iraq or how that came to be the center of the battle.

You can't prepare for every question. One woman asks if she can shake his hand. She was referring to an event a few weeks before when a man had told Romney he wouldn't vote for a Mormon.

Romney asked whether he could shake his hand anyway, but the guy said he couldn't.

After the event, I saw a few people talking about Romney and asked their opinion. Greg Correale was saying how much he admired Romney and how good a president he thought he'd be. It was not a unanimous opinion in this discussion group.

I asked his wife, Doris, who, after some urging, said her problem was his religion. Anti-Mormon feeling is real. It's as real as a stunning USA Today/Gallup poll finding that 24 percent of all voters wouldn't vote for a Mormon for president.

"It's something I'm just a little skeptical about, that's all," Doris Correale says. "I guess not knowing where he's coming from. I'm a Christian, and there's a definite difference."

Her husband asks whether she would vote for someone Jewish. She says she would. I can see this is not her favorite thing to discuss with a reporter. Greg Correale turns to me and says, "She wonders if somebody can believe (as a Mormon) what else he might be capable of believing."

In his last speech of the day, Romney hits some of the highlights - that he's optimistic and Democrats are not, that he wants to put down the "drawbridge" to world trade and that Democrats, looking at rivals like China, "want to pull the drawbridge up," that Democrats don't get the war on terror and that Republicans do.

"Can you imagine Democrats in charge? John Edwards, saying there's no global war on terror?" Romney says. It's a shot at Edwards' remark that Bush treats the war on terror as if it were a "bumper sticker" slogan. Campaigns aren't a place, though, to deal in subtlety.

"Where has he been?" Romney says. "Tell that to the people of Indonesia, tell that to the people of Thailand, tell that to Pakistan or Egypt, or Sudan and Somalia, tell that to the people in Tanzania and Kenya. Tell that to the people in Madrid, and London, to the people in New York. Tell that to the people of America."

But the real story he has come to tell is of McCain and Giuliani pulling up the drawbridge in Iowa by backing out of the Ames Straw Poll. For a guy who constantly talks about how optimistic he is, this was a good way to end the day.

Romney tells the joke about a dog playing poker in a bar and the guy asking the bartender if he's any good. The bartender says no - that every time the dog gets a good hand, he wags his tail.

Romney tells the crowd, "In my case, I feel like wagging my tail tonight."

You can go with that visual. Or you can concentrate on his hair.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.