The real Romney

Dean Barnett:

I FIRST met Mitt Romney at a Lincoln Day dinner in 1994, during the earliest days of his failed Senate race against Ted Kennedy. The next weekend, I was helping him to collect the signatures he needed to get on the ballot for the Republican primary. In a supermarket parking lot, Mr. Romney dashed about for hours introducing himself to voters, few of whom knew who he was.

It was Mr. Romney’s first real campaign and his first time collecting signatures. He enjoyed learning the intricacies of retail politics even at their most banal: I remember that he was impressed by the expertise of veteran signature-gatherers in the arcane area of clipboard management.

I spent a lot of time with Mr. Romney that year, and I occasionally served as his volunteer driver, taking him to local campaign events. The Mitt Romney I got to know was warm and likable. He had an electric intelligence. He was unfailingly decent. He was totally committed to his family. He treated everyone with respect and kindness.

If you’re like most politically attuned Americans, you probably don’t agree with my description of Mr. Romney. You may consider him to be the personification of political ambition. You possibly believe he will say anything to get elected president. You might even consider him one of the least honorable politicians in the country.

As a longtime admirer of Mr. Romney’s, it pains me that many Americans believe these things. Even worse, Mr. Romney’s presidential campaign has given them cause to feel this way. As a result, in the Michigan primary today, he is fighting for his political life.

I often marvel at how the public perception of Mr. Romney differs so radically from the man I know. The blame for this lies in the campaign he has run.

Early in the presidential race, Mr. Romney perceived a tactical advantage in becoming the campaign’s social conservative. Religious conservatives and other Republicans with socially conservative views found the two early front-runners, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, unacceptable. As someone who shares the beliefs of social conservatives, Mr. Romney saw an opportunity that he could exploit. He made social issues the heart of his candidacy.

This tack rang false with the public because it was false. The problem wasn’t so much the perception of widespread “flip-flopping” on issues like abortion. The public allows its politicians a measure of flexibility. But the public correctly sensed something disingenuous about Mr. Romney’s campaign.

Voters perceived the cynicism of a campaign that tried to exploit wedge issues rather than focus on the issues that in truth most interested the candidate. They sensed phoniness. As a consequence, many have grown to feel that Mitt Romney can’t be trusted. This lack of trust is now the dominant and perhaps insurmountable obstacle that the Romney campaign faces.

I know few voters will believe this, but Mitt Romney wants to be president out of a sense of duty. He feels our government needs someone with his managerial skills. He also feels that to fight the long war facing us, we need an intellectually curious president who’s willing to learn about an unfamiliar foe and who will fight resolutely to defeat that foe.

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I think he is a decent guy, but he has built the perceptions that haunt his campaign and he must overcome them to win. Ne is clearly intelligent, or he would not have been so successful in his business and personal life. It is too bad that those characteristics did not inform his campaign in the formative phase. Now the ambiguity of his passions has left him with a campaign where his most apparent one is saying what ever it takes to be elected.