Where is the Love?

Among the hallowed traditions of latter-day presidential politics is the full-body agripander in the Iowa cornfields. Every four years, the local populace demands obeisance to extravagant crop and ethanol subsidies, and the presidential hopefuls inevitably respond with paeans to the family farm and renewable energy–even though such subsidies have long been shown to be boondoggles of the highest order.

And so I was interested to see how Mitt Romney would respond to a roomful of western-Iowa business folks in the thriving town of Treynor recently. In similar circumstances four years ago, Romney’s agripandering had been effulgent and shameless. This time was different. Rick Schwark, an ethanol refiner, was the first of several corn-related pleaders, and he wasn’t shy: “Ethanol is an American success story,” he began, protesting the imminent reduction of the $6 billion subsidy his industry gets, “but there has been a lot of misinformation. Ethanol has created over 400,000 jobs.”

Romney listened and answered carefully. He talked about the importance of renewable fuels. He talked about the need for energy independence. He talked about his past support for ethanol subsidies as a way to get the industry off the ground. “But I’ve indicated that the subsidies shouldn’t go on forever,” he concluded, “and this one will end in December.”

He had wielded the scalpel so delicately, after so much pro-business anesthesia, that some of those in the room weren’t quite sure that Romney had actually excised their beloved subsidy. Kevin Ross, the president of the Iowa Corn Growers Association, tried the question once more, and Romney affably shot him down. “I’ll take a close look at it, but I’m not running for office based on making promises of handing out money,” he said. “I’m enough of a business guy to take a look at the books and see what’s needed and what isn’t.” Ethanol clearly wasn’t.

Twice more the subject was broached, and twice more Romney gently demurred. “That took a lot of [walnuts],” said Ward Chambers, a cardiologist with an arid sense of humor. “But he was able to deliver the bad news in a way that was palatable to the businesspeople in the room. That was very smart politics.”

Those are not phrases that have often been associated with Mitt Romney in the past: smart politics and able to deliver bad news. They are still not an entirely comfortable fit, but one modification in Romney’s second campaign for the presidency has been his willingness, at times, to tell Republican audiences things they don’t exactly want to hear. He swaddles these disappointments in business expertise, attacks on Barack Obama (some justified, others fantasized) and a brisk, pleasant manner.

In pure political-performance terms, this has made Romney a much stronger candidate than he was four years ago. He seems to have discovered an ancient, buried truth of American politics: you gain credibility–you seem more real–if you don’t try to please all of the people all of the time. As with everything else Romney does, though, courage is carefully calculated, with an eye to a general-election campaign against Obama. In these straitened times, ethanol subsidies have passed their sell-by date.

Unfortunately, all Romney’s calculations, all the improvements in his stump and debate performances–all of it has left him in the same old place, uninspiring to moderates and untrustworthy to conservatives, an unloved, forlorn front runner. He maintains the support of 20% of Republicans, more or less, but the vast majority of Romney’s potential supporters have suffered a series of malarial fevers and chills, warming and cooling on his opponents, desperate to find a candidate to take his place.

We are near the endgame of the Republican nominating race now. The Iowa caucuses will be held on Jan. 3, the New Hampshire primary a week later. These contests become extremely intense in their final days; it is impossible to skate through without a thorough public frisking. Romney was found wanting in the final days four years ago, after spending about $10 million in Iowa. He was then dispatched by John McCain in New Hampshire. Most experts assume he’ll do better this time against a weaker field, but many of the grassroots Republicans I’ve talked to have the same old suspicions about him. He’s too rich, too polished–he’s an elitist in a party that has become home to disaffected white, working-class voters. He’s a Mormon, which usually goes unspoken but is a matter of real mistrust for many Evangelical Christian voters. He’s too moderate. He passed an individual-mandate health care plan in Massachusetts and favored the bank bailouts in 2008, “which takes two of our best issues against Obama off the table if he’s the nominee,” says one of his rivals, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania.

But these problems pale in comparison with his brazen flip-floppery on issues large and small. Sometimes a flip is justified, as with Romney’s position on ethanol. But all too often his switchbacks have been so expedient as to make you wonder how stupid, or shortsighted, he thinks the electorate is. His suddenly tough position on illegal immigration this year was a convenient way to go after Rick Perry, who he assumed would be his prime rival for the nomination, and it has come in handy again now that the surging Newt Gingrich has staked a claim for moderation on the issue. (He’s also gone after Gingrich as “a career politician,” another attack he used against Perry.) “Your core values are tied directly to the policy decisions that you’ve made,” says his one moderate opponent, former governor Jon Huntsman of Utah. “When you’ve been on both sides–sometimes on three sides–of every issue, people begin to wonder who you really are. They simply will not elect someone they don’t trust.”

At a town meeting in Sioux City, just before his visit to Treynor, Romney strolled gracefully through a minefield of hard-core Republican questions without offering much red meat to the assembled carnivores. Asked about a constitutional amendment on abortion, he said he thought such issues should be left to the states. “Would you abolish the Internal Revenue Service?” He didn’t say no but slid easily into a crisp outline of what he would do: reform the tax code, bringing down marginal rates, and offer tax relief for families with incomes under $200,000.

“What are you going to do about czars?” a woman asked, repeating a Glenn Beck trope about special envoys and advisers whom Obama has added to his staff–a sure sign of creeping socialism (although many of them are now gone). Romney seemed confused by the question and asked the woman what she meant by czars. “I thought at first you were talking about the SARS virus,” he said, attempting a joke, perhaps, though no one laughed. He proceeded to answer her question substantively. He believed there was a need for special envoys to deal with overseas diplomatic problems, but having special White House assistants “who manage Cabinet posts doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

The answer was deft but unsatisfying. Romney seemed not to recognize the Tea Party code: czars is fighting jargon, an anti-Obama rant was being requested, and Romney failed to deliver. The SARS response sent a subliminal message to the base: He isn’t really one of us. “He won me over a little bit,” a conservative activist named Linda Holub told me after the Sioux City meeting. “But he’s still not my candidate. I wonder about his core convictions.”

A Constant Opacity

During one of the innumerable, but thoroughly entertaining, Republican debates recently, the CNBC moderator John Harwood asked Romney to defend his multiple, sequential, conflicting positions on the auto bailout. Romney had asked, “Where is Washington?” in 2008, then opposed the Obama bailout, then–when the bailout succeeded–said Obama had pursued the “managed bankruptcy” that he had favored all along. Romney tried, unsuccessfully, to extricate himself from the question, but Harwood persisted, and Romney launched into a much discussed evasion: “I think people understand that I’m a man of steadiness and constancy,” he began, citing his 42-year marriage, his Mormon faith and the 25 years he spent at one company, Bain Capital. And then he turned it into an attack: “I think it is outrageous the Obama campaign continues to push this idea.”

Romney neglected to mention one additional area of constancy: in his 17-year public career, he has been consistently opaque. Indeed, he has always campaigned as something he probably is not. When he ran for Senator and then governor in Massachusetts, he pretended to be more liberal than he probably was on social issues like abortion and gay rights. Running for President, he has pretended to be more conservative than he actually is on a variety of issues–taxes, health care, the environment, immigration. His one term as governor of Massachusetts probably offers the truest portrait of what he’d be like as President, but he has disavowed his greatest achievement–universal health care–and his interest in being governor waned dramatically as he began to focus on the presidency. “They talk about politicians getting Potomac fever,” says Stephen Crosby, dean of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston. “Romney got Potomac Ebola virus.”

The impression that Romney is either furtive or phony in the service of this ambition has been exacerbated by the campaign he has chosen to run in 2011. It is the least accessible presidential campaign in memory. Chris Wallace of Fox News recently complained that Romney had not appeared on any of the Sunday-morning talk shows in nearly 20 months. He has allowed himself to be questioned by the reliable Sean Hannity, but he has not agreed to cooperate with any potentially tough, or even balanced, mainstream-media stories about him, including this one. This evasiveness might have become more of an issue if it weren’t for two things: the near weekly schedule of debates has given Romney the appearance of accessibility, and the slapstick haplessness of his opponents has proved to be a riveting diversion.

The sideshow has worked to Romney’s tremendous advantage. That he’s an excellent debater hasn’t hurt either. It has made him seem constant and competent by comparison, the most presidential of the bunch. But the question always remains: Who is he really? Do we have any clues as to what he actually believes?

Sifting through the Romney policy record, in an attempt to find patterns and answers, is an act of geology. There are sedimentary layers on issues like abortion, climate change, health care, gun control–almost any issue you can imagine. His shifts are usually artful and nuanced, although sometimes they can be brutally abrupt and painfully expedient, as with immigration, or assault-weapons bans, which he supported until his 2008 presidential campaign. It is often fascinating to watch Romney’s mind at work as he flips his flops. Abortion is a classic case. His first public position was itself a flip-flop: running for the Senate in 1994, he announced that he was personally opposed to abortion but that “I do not impose my beliefs on other people.” Previously, as a Mormon bishop, he had gone so far as to visit a woman in the hospital to try to dissuade her from having an abortion, a story recently recounted in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.

He was still sort of pro-choice when he ran for governor in 2002, but he started flopping his flip midterm as the dire Potomac virus set in; you can’t be pro-choice in today’s Republican Party. Romney later claimed that he saw the light on Nov. 9, 2004, when he had a long conversation with a stem-cell researcher. This is not entirely implausible: advances in biology, and especially sonogram technology–making it possible to see inside the womb–have caused a fair number of Americans to modify their positions on abortion over the past decade. I suspect that Romney’s reversion to his original Mormon rectitude, on this and other social issues, may not have been purely a matter of political expediency. It may also have been something of a relief, after his clumsy attempts to please his more liberal constituents in Massachusetts. After all, he had chosen to become part of the Mormon-church hierarchy. (Huntsman, by contrast, didn’t.) He must have felt comfortable with its conservative tenets–even if, according to recent accounts, he slowly came to terms with the concept of feminism … although his present roster of advisers is top-heavy with men.

A Moderate Record

If the current republican orthodoxy on social issues seems a natural fit for Romney, the party’s rightward rush on issues of governance is a markedly less comfortable proposition for him. Romney began to get interested in politics at a moment of centrist creativity–the start of the 1990s. There was a new synergy on policy issues among moderate Democrats (led by Bill Clinton) and so-called Empowerment Republicans (led by Gingrich, amazingly enough). There were fierce differences on some issues, like taxes. But there was a surprising agreement on a new formula for domestic policy: the use of conservative means, like market incentives, to achieve liberal ends. Some of the best ideas were born in the Republican Party and adopted, with modifications, by the Democrats: a cap-and-trade system to control carbon emissions, an individual mandate and progressive government subsidies to create universal health insurance, the earned-income tax credit to bolster the paychecks of the working poor. Romney seemed to fit very neatly into this new, dynamic centrism as governor of Massachusetts.

Michael Brown, a co-founder of City Year, an excellent national-service program, says Romney was one of his strongest supporters even before he entered politics. “In 1991, we invited all the presidential candidates to come and talk,” Brown recalls. “After Bill Clinton’s talk, he and Romney and I had dinner, and I remember Romney saying to him, ‘If you become President, you really should take this program national.'” Later, when Romney was governor, City Year–by then part of AmeriCorps–was in danger of having its funding cut off by the Bush Administration. “We asked Romney if he’d join with Ed Rendell [of Pennsylvania] to author a letter asking for the funding to be restored. He said, ‘I’d be happy to do it,’ and eventually they got 41 other governors to sign on.”

AmeriCorps is precisely the sort of government program that Republicans, including Romney, have been railing against, although Romney hasn’t mentioned it specifically. (He does want to cut off the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Amtrak, among others.) Indeed, Romney is far more careful about the evisceration of government than his Republican opponents. He doesn’t want to close the departments of Education or Energy; he doesn’t want to privatize Social Security, just raise the retirement age; he doesn’t want to eliminate the capital gains tax, except for people earning less than $200,000; he doesn’t want to eliminate the corporate tax, just reduce it to 25%. His proposed Medicare reform is more drastic, essentially a form of privatization, although he would give the elderly the option of staying in the current system, which is a “public option” by any other name.

The Lawn Sprinkler

But Romney is more than the sum of his inclinations, and flip-flops, on public-policy issues. He has a distinct ethos, which is indeed consistent. He is, at his core, a businessman, but of a particular sort: a turnaround artist, a consultant who takes control of a company, flushes out its inefficiencies and then sells it at a profit. And he is at his most convincing as a candidate when he talks about applying some of those principles to government. “Today, nine federal agencies run 47 different federal worker-retraining programs at a cost of $18 billion a year,” he said in a recent speech. “I will send those workforce-training dollars back to the states, empowering them to retrain workers in ways that fit the needs of their respective economies.”

Romney made a fortune finding efficiencies like that. He was a master at creative destruction, using the skills he’d learned as a management consultant to take sleepy companies and make them sleek. He was at the forefront of the business revolution of the 1980s, when debt replaced equity as the primary tool to raise capital. A great deal of good came of this, and Romney isn’t shy about recounting his success stories–the creation of Staples, the office-supply chain, for example. But there was a significant downside to this revolution as well, and Ted Kennedy ran devastating television ads during the 1994 Senate campaign about the jobs lost in Romney restructurings. In sum, the form of capitalism that Romney practiced helped revive the U.S. corporate sector in the 1980s and made it more efficient in the short term but left it less likely to produce new products and technologies in the long term–with the exception of Wall Street, where phenomenal salaries lured the smartest young Americans to create fabulous new computerized gambling devices with, as former Fed chairman Paul Volcker has noted, no redeeming social value.

Romney has been particularly vague about the Wall Street crash and the causes of the Great Recession. His 150-page economic plan acknowledges that financial regulation is necessary, but he doesn’t specify which kind. And this is where his refusal to be interviewed is most frustrating: No one has asked Romney to evaluate the downside of the capitalism he practiced. No one has asked him how he’d turn the fierce bias toward short-term profit into a more patient, productive, labor-intensive system. These are essential questions for 2012. They need to be answered slowly, carefully. Merely blaming the government is not enough (and ignoring them, as Obama has, isn’t sufficient either).

Mitt Romney has a curious body language when speaking to civilians at town meetings. He moves in tiny steps, rotating to his right, then to his left, covering his entire audience like a lawn sprinkler. He speaks softly but very quickly, almost too quickly, spraying facts and policy one-liners on the crowd. It sounds more robotic than it appears; his fluency and command of facts are easy on the ears. But he is always in motion, a moving target, a turnaround artist in more ways than one. So far this year, his retooled machine has moved too subtly to be caught. His tiny movements pass for stability in a field of candidates whose mistakes are melodramatic, whose fortunes soar and plunge. This may be enough to win the nomination; it may even be enough to beat Obama. But if he’s elected President, Romney will have to turn off the motor, sit down in a big chair and make some decisions–and one wonders if he’ll be able to summon the courage, the uncalculated courage, that has so often been missing in his presidential campaigns.