Mitt Romney has been running for president for over six years,
since his final days as governor of Massachusetts. He has run for public office three times
before. He won his race for governor in
2002 and lost his race for the Senate in 1994, and for president in 2008. He was third in the Republican presidential
primaries in 2008, measured by number of delegates won, and conceded to John
McCain just over a month into the race.
This year it took much longer to settle the nomination. A number of highly rated candidates, including
Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels (all successful current or former
governors) failed to enter the race, leaving Romney the favorite in a
lackluster field. Yet it was not until
April that he finally dispatched Rick Santorum, a militantly conservative
former senator from Pennsylvania who lost his re-election bid in 2006 by eighteen
points, and Newt Gingrich, a mercurial former Speaker of the House of
Representatives who had “more baggage than the airlines”, as a pro-Romney ad
memorably put it.
Romney has struggled with the conservative base, which had
misgivings about his inconsistent record. Right-wing pundits dwelt on the fact that he
had run for the Senate, and for governor of Massachusetts, promising not to
limit access to abortion—but now claimed to be vehemently pro-life. By the same token, he had supported a regional
cap-and-trade scheme to trim greenhouse-gas emissions in Massachusetts before
renouncing it late in his governorship. He now says that the causes and extent of
global warming are too uncertain to merit expensive efforts to fight it,
especially in such grim economic times. Above
all, he stoked suspicions on the right by championing health-care reforms in
Massachusetts that served as the template for Barack Obama’s health-care law,
before denouncing Obamacare as an affront to liberty that must be repealed.
In the end Romney prevailed partly by adopting a series of
positions designed to please right-wing primary voters. He unexpectedly unveiled a proposal for a
whopping tax cut that the 59-point economic plan he released last year had
mysteriously failed to mention. He also developed a fervent opposition to
anything that smacked of compassion towards illegal immigrants, chastising both
Gingrich and Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, for their supposed lapses in
that regard during debates among the Republican candidates. Romney and his
supporters also vastly outspent his rivals, blitzing them with vicious
advertisements.
Since clinching the nomination, Romney has moved back towards
the center in some respects. He has spent most of his time and advertising
budget talking about the economy, rather than the more polarizing social issues
that often arose in the primaries. He has released a new immigration policy which
makes no mention of his call for those present illegally to “self-deport”, but
embraces some more cuddly-sounding goals such as reuniting families and making
it easier for foreigners to take up seasonal jobs. He has also pledged to rescind the $716 billion
in savings that Obama’s health-care reforms aim to garner from Medicare over
the next decade, presumably to curry favor with older voters.
Romney’s advisers, a peculiar mix of zealots and moderates,
provide little hint as to where his own instincts really lie. On immigration policy he has sought the advice
of Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas, and the guiding force behind
controversial laws in Alabama and Arizona cracking down on illegal immigrants. On foreign policy he has consulted lots of
bellicose neocons from the Bush administration, notably John Bolton, as well as
a few more measured voices, such as Robert Zoellick. Two mainstream academics and former advisers
to Mr Bush, Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard, have the most prominent roles on the
economic team.
The campaign has unveiled endless “advisory groups” on different
topics—with more members than Romney could possibly consult in a lifetime, let
alone during a presidential campaign. It
is hard to know whose counsel Romney really values beyond that of his wife, a
few former colleagues from his days as a private-equity investor, and his senior
campaign staff, many of whom are holdovers from his previous presidential run. Ed Gillespie, a former chairman of the
Republican National Committee and co-founder of the Crossroads groups, which
plan to spend hundreds of millions of dollars this year boosting Republican
candidates, is also playing a role.
By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate this month, Romney has
further muddied the ideological waters. Ryan,
after all, is best known for his efforts to cut spending on entitlement programs
such as Medicare—something Romney is now attacking President Obama for. His selection is widely seen as an effort to
enthuse the Republican base, which likes his government-shrinking budget
proposals. Democrats spy an opening:
they are drooling at the chance to link Romney with Ryan’s ruthless proposed
cuts to things like food stamps and student loans.
One of the most dangerous parts of Romney’s campaign since
clinching the nomination is his lack of openness and specificity. He has refused to make tax returns available,
not even going back a measly five years when his father proudly started the
practice of making the candidates’ returns public in the 1960’s by releasing
twelve years of returns. What does
Romney have to hide? We know that he had
a Swiss bank account and that he has investment funds offshore, both of which
smell bad for someone who wishes to be president. If there is nothing to hide, why not bring
everything out into the open?
Also, he has not really provided any specifics on the proposals
he has brought forward. He seems to
think that there will be no divided Congress if he elected and that he will be
able to make changes by mandate. More
about this problem in future posts.
