COLUMNISTS : Off-stage with Matinee Mitt
Posted on Sunday, July 9, 2006
Mitt Romney looks pretty good for a guy who
died 38 years ago. The Republican governor
of Massachusetts is fit, vibrant, articulate, with the perfect amount of gray around the temples of his slicked-back dark hair. Think Ted Danson meets a George Hamilton who uses sun block. It’s bad form to comment on the physical appearance of even a politician. But in the case of a pol nicknamed Matinee Mitt, it’d be almost insulting if you didn’t. Especially considering that the guy was pronounced dead in 1968. “Il est mort,” a French policeman wrote on Romney’s passport after the car he was driving was struck head on by another. Back home, his father George Romney, then governor of Michigan, and young Romney’s girlfriend received sketchy reports of Mitt’s untimely demise. They lived with the thought for hours, until the U. S. ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver, called to say that the French cop had it, well, dead wrong. I first read that story in Sridhar Pappu’s snuggly profile of Romney in The Atlantic, one in a series of features in the national press establishing the Bay State’s governor as an early Flavor of the Month in a presidential campaign still years away. I confirmed the story with the governor when I sat down with him Thursday night in a large, concrete-floored storage room of the Statehouse Convention Center. We were just removed from the GOP fund-raiser that had brought Romney to Little Rock.
True confession: I didn’t want to like him. Mainly because everybody else in the press does—excepting, of course, the public prints in his hometown. (Isn’t that always the way ?) Plus, he carries the obvious baggage of the silver-spoon set: a member of the Lucky Sperm Club who sank the triple-bank shot of success in business, politics and even sports—as head of the ’ 02 Olympics in Salt Lake City. What’s not to hate ?
But Romney doesn’t come across as an insufferable patrician-politician forever on the make. When a local TV reporter asked the first- (and last ) term governor of Massachusetts to describe the arc of his political career, he joked, “If I had to describe my political career, I’d say short.”
Unlikely, too. Here’s a Mormon Republican Michigander by way of Utah who’s the conservative governor of... Massachusetts. The bluest of blue states where the ideal pol is considered an Irish Catholic with a last name of Kennedy. Or at least the initials JFK. And here’s Romney without a whiff of a Baw-ston accent. Midwest whitebread all the way.
What’s more, Romney had the poor taste to actually challenge Ted Kennedy for his lifetime Senate seat back in ’ 94. Not even the Republican Revolution that year could keep Romney from getting stomped.
“I’d lose to Kennedy again today,” he says. “I’m a white male Mormon millionaire ! Come on !”
So what’s a white male Mormon millionaire from Massachusetts doing running for president ? Oh, he won’t confirm it. But he’s running in the same way that Mike Huckabee is running. He’s running to see if he should run. More interesting than the rah-rah speeches Thursday in support of Asa Hutchinson was seeing Huckabee and Romney—a couple of mediumshot contenders for president—on the same stage, side by side, trading acts.
Call it a draw. Both are clintonesque in their ability to work a room full of friendlies. Think George W. Bush; then think the opposite. The GOP presidential primary may not be loaded with familiar names come ’ 08, but at least it promises to be intelligible.
After the speech, in that makeshift storage room
off-stage, I wanted to know three things from
Governor Romney: (1 ) How’s his plan to get all Bay Staters health insurance coming along ? (2 ) When he first ran for governor, he was regularly described as socially moderate, but now he continually styles himself as a conservative Republican. Given his current positions against same-sex marriage and civil unions, against abortion, against homosexual couples being foster parents, is there any moderate left in Mitt Romney ? And (3 ) the obvious: How’s a millionaire Mormon from Massachusetts going to appeal to the evangelical, red-state South ?
He says RomneyCare passed the Ledge by a combined vote of 198-to-2, and Ted Kennedy showed up at the bill’s signing. A bill, by the way, crafted with help from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank about as Kennedy-friendly as a rain-slick bridge. It’s almost impossible to explain RomneyCare quickly and coherently, but the thrust is that every citizen of Massachusetts will be required to buy health insurance the same way motorists are required to have car insurance. If you can’t afford it, the state will help, dipping into a pool of money already reserved to aid the uninsured. At least one conservative critic says the plan is another government subsidy in disguise. But even if RomneyCare fails, it’ll make for an interesting experiment. And it’s hard to criticize Matinee Mitt for trying a radical solution to a never-ending problem. As for that bit about Romney’s moderate bona fides, I found myself a lot less interested in that question after listening to him go on about health care and schools. He can talk education policy with the best D. C. wonks, and embraces the kind of real reforms that drive unions to sue—like merit pay for teachers. It struck me that Romney may be a social conservative in the way that Huckabee is: Firm in his faithbased beliefs, but not willing to ride them over a cliff. Note that, when it comes to gay couples being foster parents, Romney says he abides by state law that allows for it. Too bad he can’t keep his hands off the Massachusetts law that allows for same-sex marriage. Finally, the obvious. Mormon. Massachusetts. Money. Where’s the red-state appeal ? “Conservatives like people who battle the opposition in their home land. And I’m a conservative in a liberal state.” He is that. He’s also outta here, suddenly up and shaking hands, heading for the exit and the next stage in his pre-campaign for president, leaving something of a political paradox in his personable wake.
—––––– • –––––—Kane Webb is assistant editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at kwebb@arkansasonline. com.
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