Mitt Romney: The Right Man in the Wrong Time

Mitt Romney has announced that he will not seek reelection to the Senate next year. There is much to say about Romney’s long career in politics, and I’ve had a front-row seat for it since I spent Election Night 1994 at the Romney for Senate “victory” party at the Copley Plaza in Boston. It is safe to say that I have been a frequent Romney critic, writing extensive denunciations of him during both the 2008 and 2012 primaries. I cast a protest vote for Newt Gingrich in the 2012 primary, but I also had a Romney–Ryan yard sign in 2012, at least until Hurricane Sandy required that it be taken indoors.

Along the way, after watching his father’s presidential campaign self-destruct over a gaffe, Romney left Michigan, made a fortune in business, changed in and out of the Republican Party, changed his positions on issues too numerous to mention, lost a Senate race to Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts by 17 points in the 1994 Republican wave, went to Utah and saved the 2002 Winter Olympics with brilliant management in a crisis, got elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 in another Republican wave, signed the state-level model for Obamacare into law, fought a losing battle against judicially imposed same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, declined to run for reelection in 2006 (thus handing his state to a Democrat while fellow Republican incumbent governors in Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Vermont were bucking the blue wave to get reelected), ran for president in 2008 and lost the primary to John McCain, ran again in 2012, became the first Mormon to win a major-party nomination, lost the general election to Barack Obama (helping along the way to elevate his running mate Paul Ryan, later speaker of the House, and his endorser Donald Trump), then returned in 2018 to get elected to the Senate from Utah, where he has compiled a moderately conservative record but also been a vocal critic of Trump, whom he voted to convict in both of Trump’s impeachment trials.

Conservatives will not miss Romney’s votes or his policy proposals in the Senate, nor will Republicans miss him as a candidate. Utah remains solidly red and is almost certain to elect a more conservative replacement. Americans will miss his sense of integrity. And therein lies the basic contradiction of Romney’s political career.

Throughout his political career, Romney has been the right man in the wrong time. He has been an unfailingly admirable man, and an expert at running things and leading people. His personal record of good deeds — extending far beyond write-a-check charity to real expenditures of his time, sweat, and heart — would put nearly anyone in American public life to shame. As I wrote in 2007, “He’s obviously a good family man, a man of faith and unquestioned personal integrity. He seems like the kind of guy anyone would be glad to have as a next-door neighbor or a son-in-law.” He loves America with an old-fashioned unironic corniness. If you were choosing a leader for any sort of enterprise, Mitt Romney is the kind of man you would pick: smart, polished, incorruptible, tireless, focused on the goal and on leaving nobody in his charge behind. Mormon culture in America tends to valorize niceness, communal cooperation, hard work, and the spirit of the early wagon-train pioneers. Romney is the kind of man you’d want leading a wagon train of families into an untracked wilderness.

Political leadership in America, however, is not just about management. It is fundamentally a contest of ideas. And the world of political ideas has always been Mitt Romney’s Achilles’ heel. For all of Romney’s earnestness, he always struck me as a man deeply cynical about politics (in large part because of the traumatic experience of seeing his father’s reputation destroyed over a single poor word choice) and utterly lacking in political principles. That’s how he told equally persuasive stories about his conversions to the pro-choice and pro-life causes at different stages of his career. As I wrote in 2012, “The dual conversion narrative leaves both positions sounding hollow and insincere: St. Paul only went to Damascus the one time.” My view at the time of what Romney’s campaign represented was, in retrospect, a preview of where our movement would go four years later behind another northeastern business tycoon of unfixed beliefs:

Mitt Romney’s record is just one endless sheet of thin ice as far as the eye can see — there’s no way to have any kind of confidence that we can tell people he stands for something today without being made fools of tomorrow. We who have laughed along with Jim Geraghty’s prescient point that every Obama promise comes with an expiration date will be the ones laughed at, and worse yet we will know the critics are right. Every time I try to talk myself into thinking we can live with him, I run into this problem. It’s one that particularly bedeviled Republicans during the Nixon years — many partisan Republicans loved Nixon because he made the right enemies and fought them without cease or mercy, but the man’s actual policies compromised so many of our principles that the party was crippled in the process even before Watergate. We can stand for Romney, but we’ll find soon enough that that’s all we stand for.

In 2008, Romney was embraced by a lot of people on the populist and talk-radio right because they hated McCain so much. I never fell for it, and neither did Phil Klein, who at the time was hammering Romney over Romneycare. The fiscal conservatives who preferred even McCain to Romney were right on that score: Romney’s mistake in giving Democrats what they wanted on health care meant that his message in 2012 was hopelessly muddled. Republicans picked the one man who took off the table the president’s chief political vulnerability — another mistake the party seems primed to repeat in 2024.

Electorally, Romney’s business savvy would probably have stood him in much better stead than McCain in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, but Republicans were probably going to lose that election no matter what. The bigger problem with adhering to Romney as a national candidate was that he prevented the party from giving a full shot to a Tea Party–style conservative in 2012. The thwarted energy of that movement in 2012 curdled into something much less principled in 2016. Romney’s 2012 campaign and its failure were at the heart of the election that drove American politics mad. The Romney–Ryan ticket represented the apogee of clean-cut, respectable Republicans acceptable to what were believed to be the key swing voters, and they in fact did outrageously well with suburbanites, white college graduates, white women, and other traditional swing groups. According to exit polls, they beat Obama with voters age 30 and up. And they still lost. The party organs concluded that Romney had been too much of an anti-illegal-immigration hawk, but the voters went in the opposite direction, rejecting not so much Romney’s ideas (such as they were) as his style — not his vices as a politician, but his virtues as a man.

Democrats smeared Romney with glee and without remorse — witness Harry Reid’s “Romney didn’t win, did he?” excuse for lying about Romney’s taxes. But they summoned Trump by doing so. And even many Democrats have had to acknowledge, however softly, that Romney was right about Russia in 2012, and that Obama and Joe Biden who mocked him for his warnings about Vladimir Putin (remember “the ’80s called”?) could scarcely have been more wrong.

In leaving office at the age of 76, even while he appears as healthy and vigorous as a man two decades his junior, Romney is setting one more good example for our geriatric political class. “At the end of another term, I’d be in my mid 80s,” he says. “Frankly, it’s time for a new generation of leaders. They’re the ones who need to make the decisions that shape the world they will be living in.” One hopes there is still time for Republican presidential-primary voters to hear that message. As for that next generation, I do not especially recommend that they imitate Romney’s political career. But they could still learn a lot from a man who has been a model of a life well lived in the public eye, and who is going home to his wife and his grandchildren, rich in all the ways that really matter.