Seeking sanity on Planet Massachusetts

Kathleen Parker

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | There was a time not so long ago when a sane person could say, "Children need a mom and a dad," and the townspeople would yawn, roll their eyes and wonder why some folks insist on sharing such prosaic insights.

This might still be true in some parts of the world, but not in Massachusetts, where the water apparently is tainted with more than old tea, and where stating the obvious — as Gov. Mitt Romney recently did — will get you labeled a hate-mongering radical wing nut.

Actually, it's worse than that. For his support of the traditional, two-parent, heterosexual family, Romney has been accused of being like President George W. Bush. Now them's fightin' words, for sure.

In a damning editorial, the Boston Globe criticized Romney for taking "a page from President Bush's illogic by insisting that every child 'has a right to a mother and a father,' implying that two women or two men could not possibly do the job."

Actually, Romney's statement implies nothing of the sort. Two men and two women can raise children, just as one woman or one man can raise children. But neither case provides an ideal environment, which is Romney's point as well as the opinion of a majority of Americans.

Romney, who made his remarks during visits to Utah and South Carolina, doesn't get a free pass. Some of his remarks were, shall we say, not well considered. In one instance, the governor said that same-sex marriage is "a blow to the family." In another, he noted that some same-sex couples are "actually having children born to them."

As excerpted, that last statement sounds as though Romney were discussing some alien species that somehow managed to replicate human progeny. But within the larger context of the same-sex marriage debate, his meaning might be understood as something else. Not that gays have no right to families of their own, but that in principle, children's interests are best served by having both a mother and a father.

Most Americans agree with that statement — which is imminently reasonable and which surely is just as true for gay children as for straights. How many gays or lesbians, after all, would prefer to have had no mother, or no father, as the case may be?

For purposes of discussion, no abused children are allowed to respond. Clearly, we're talking about ideals and principles, not worst-case scenarios, as The Globe editorial does in one of its most fallacious arguments, posed as questions:

"Would Romney support dissolving that child's family?" the editorial asks, referring to the child of a same-sex family. "Would he prevent gay couples from adopting needy children — products of often abusive homes or dissolved heterosexual unions?"

Again, nothing Romney said suggests either that he would break up gay couples or try to prevent abused children from finding a safe home, even with a same-sex couple. Believing that children are best off with a mother and a father is a principle, not a strategy for hurting people who happen to be homosexual.

The Globe editorial also relies on the testimony of children to make a case for same-sex marriage. Doubtless these are lovely children who love their parents, but they ARE children. One, an 11-year-old boy whose parents are lesbians, spoke at a recent demonstration outside the governor's office, saying:

"My family is just an ordinary family, and I don't know why we can't live together and be happy."

Again, no one has said this child can't live with his two mothers or that he can't be happy. What traditional-family advocates believe is that an 11-year-old boy also would benefit from having a dad. By endorsing same-sex marriage, society effectively declares otherwise.

Obviously, he's better off without a dad who is also an abusive, pill-popping, philandering drunk. But once again, the worst dad possible should not be our standard for defining family policy.

Ultimately, there may be no resolution to these differences in perspective. No one can fault gays and lesbians for wanting spouses and children of their own. We all — hetero and homo — seem to be equally deranged on that score. But the essential question is not what adults want, but what is best for children.

In principle if not always in practice.

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The Republicans' Mr. Fix-it

Mitt Romney standing on pier in front of his home on lake Winnipessaukee, NH.

Mitt Romney, a few minutes before appearing at a "Ask Mitt Anything Town Hall Meeting", in Muscatine, Iowa.

Mitt Romney is filthy rich, he's handsome, and he's the first honest-to-god businessman to have a real shot at the White House in 40 years.

By Marcia Vickers, Fortune senior writer

June 27 2007: 10:51 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Willard Mitt Romney looks great in a suit. Which is good for him, because all day "Matinee Mitt" has been wearing a crisp, gray number. Speeches, grip-and-grin events, a veterans hall - no venue-appropriate costume changes, just pure Brooks Brothers. Even now, when it's 85 degrees and he's surrounded by people in shorts, the man won't so much as loosen his tie.

It's Memorial Day, we're standing around waiting for a photo shoot to begin in front of his summerhouse on New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee, and he's refusing his handlers' pleas to at least take his jacket off. "This is going to be like Nixon on the beach," a campaign worker mutters, referring to a 1960s photo of the late former President strolling the sands of sunny San Clemente, looking as though he'd rather be negotiating with the Soviets.

You could interpret Romney's wardrobe as a sign of Nixonian stiffness. Or as a deliberate choice, which may be closer to the truth. Perhaps he wants to convey extreme focus and discipline. (He talks the way he looks, in perfectly controlled, press-release-ready platitudes. For example, when I ask what he'd do first as President, he answers, "I will do a complete assessment of where we are, where the problems are, what challenges we face. Every dimension of government I would take apart - look at how effective they are.")

He is, after all, the most serious major-party presidential candidate to come out of the business world since ... well, since his father, George Romney, onetime CEO of American Motors, who ran in 1968. Unlike fellow Republican George W. Bush, Romney, 60, can't be accused of being a political heir with some private-sectorish experience. He's the brilliant strategist-dealmaker who founded Bain Capital and built it into one of the largest private-equity firms in the world - and accumulated a personal fortune of around $400 million in the process. He's the turnaround artist who saved the 2002 Winter Olympics. And, as governor of Massachusetts, he's the policy innovator who pushed through some of the most promising health-care-reform legislation in a generation.

People who know him won't shut up about how smart and pragmatic and decisive he is. "Mitt never takes anything at face value," says Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia's business school and a Romney (and former Bush administration) economic advisor. "He's constantly questioning." Says Fraser Bullock, a former Bain partner who worked with Romney on the Olympics: "He's not an ideologue. He makes decisions based on researching data more deeply than anyone I know. As people get to know him better, they'll see an extremely competent, strong leader."

If the election were based on résumé bullet points, the guy would be a shoo-in. That's not how it works, of course. As we'll see, Romney has felt the need to downplay his career highlights. Some in his party worry that he's too pragmatic - that he's not ideological enough. And there's his Mormon faith, which, like it or not, probably hurts his chances.

But his business skills have come in handy. In recent polls he's the leading Republican candidate in both New Hampshire and Iowa, which is impressive, considering that he started out without the name recognition of John McCain or Rudy Giuliani. (Nationally he's lagging behind Giuliani, McCain, and Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee Senator.) More impressive still is his money-raising ability: He's raised more and has been spending it faster than his Republican opponents on ads and campaigning. His strategy, his national campaign director has said, is that "money talks, but early money screams" - legitimacy, that is.

The birth of Bain Capital

Romney was always a self-starter. "He has more energy than anyone I know," says Geoffrey Rehnert, who helped Romney start Bain Capital. He grew up steeped in business and politics. His father had parlayed his automobile industry success into a three-term governorship of Michigan; his mother, Lee, once ran for the Senate. After graduating as valedictorian from Brigham Young University, Romney headed off to Harvard, where he finished in the top 5% of his MBA class and simultaneously earned a law degree. Then he got a job at Bain & Co., where he worked as a management consultant beside Meg Whitman, now chief of eBay, and former Dell CEO Kevin Rollins.

Ultimately Romney grew frustrated because he couldn't implement the strategies he was recommending to clients. He was ready to leave Bain Consulting, the story goes, when Bill Bain offered him a chance to form a company in which he could put his management-consulting skills to work and share in any upside of the firm's stock performance. Bain Capital was born in 1984 with just $37 million to invest.

Romney's new firm set out to find companies that were under-performing their peers. His sales pitch was that Bain Capital wasn't just an investing firm - it also knew from managing. From the beginning, Bain charged its clients a 30% fee, compared with the 20% standard private-equity fee. "Bain figured out before anyone that they could apply their consulting expertise, not just financial engineering, to the companies they bought," says Steve Kaplan, a finance professor at the University of Chicago's business school. "It was very unusual when they first started. Most firms have now copied the Bain model."

For each potential investment, Romney and fellow Bainiacs would stage a "strategic audit," dissecting cash flow and market share and delving into customer satisfaction and management prowess. After studying a business in minute detail, Romney has said, "we had a pretty good map of what was right and wrong in terms of the business - what had to be fixed and which were urgent and which were long term." Under Romney, Bain invested and staged turnarounds in more than 150 companies, among them such household names as Brookstone, Sealy, and Domino's Pizza.

Romney considers Staples ( Charts, Fortune 500) his biggest success. In 1985 entrepreneur Tom Stemberg told Romney that he wanted to launch a chain of office-supply stores. Stemberg was convinced that businesses were paying far too much for paperclips, pens, and, naturally, staples. "Mitt could totally relate to the concept. He's a person who watches his pennies," says Stemberg. (Bain initially invested $600,000. Staples started in May 1986 and went public in 1989. Revenues last fiscal year: $18 billion.)

From the inception of Bain Capital to 1999 - Romney's watch - the firm posted average gross returns in excess of 100% annually. Its assets grew to more than $4 billion. And Romney, of course, got rich.

 

Mitt Romney standing on pier in front of his home on lake Winnipessaukee, NH.

Mitt Romney, a few minutes before appearing at a "Ask Mitt Anything Town Hall Meeting", in Muscatine, Iowa.

Romney on business In between campaign stops in May, Romney spent 45 minutes chatting confidently (if platitudinously) about what he'd do to stage a government turnaround. The big priorities: less wasteful spending and more private-sector-style efficiency. Some highlights...

On the role of government "I'm a big believer in allowing the free market to work and not allowing the government to lay a heavy hand on how businesses operate." On taxes "I want to get rid of all capital gains taxes for middle-income taxpayers. I also think it's fundamentally unfair that you get taxed when you've earned it, taxed when you save it, and taxed when you've died. So I'd get rid of the death [estate] tax, too, for middle-income Americans." On Sarbanes-Oxley "I would keep parts of Sarbanes-Oxley that have proven effective in insisting on managerial responsibilities. For instance, it's important that CEOs and CFOs continue to sign statements attesting to veracity of financial statements. But Sarbanes-Oxley, actually section 404, puts a weighty process and financial burden on small businesses." On his business background "I think it would be helpful to have a leader who understands how the economy works - who knows how to solve problems and would bring a fresh outside view to actually transform Washington into an enterprise that can tackle tough problems and not simply engage in partisan bickering."

Little-known Mitt facts He's a cheapskate Has been known to pop his own popcorn, which he then brings into movie theaters. He was a high school cheerleader Pep squad, Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He has run afoul of the law Arrested in high school for sliding down a hill on an ice block at a golf course. He enjoys practical jokes As a teenager, liked to dress up as a policeman and scare friends on dates in their cars. He was once pronounced dead At 21, after a car crash in France. Romney survived, obviously.

"It wasn't always clear that Mitt wanted to go into politics," says Fraser Bullock. "My view is that he was raised in a household dedicated to public service. It was in his DNA." For Romney's part, he says he felt called to serve at this "special time in the history of America [with] the challenges and opportunities." He says he's the guy for the Oval Office because of his experience "innovating and transforming" in the private sector.

Indeed, Romney was a registered Independent in the early '90s. But in 1994, now a Republican, he surprised his Bain colleagues by trying to unseat longtime Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat. It was a disaster. Kennedy turned Romney's stellar business record around on him, running attack ads featuring union workers who said they'd been fired after Bain took over their company. Romney claimed he had nothing to do with the layoffs, but it's undeniable that, as with many restructurings, Bain deals involved hundreds of job cuts. In any event, Kennedy trounced Romney.

"Mitt learned a hard lesson there, perhaps too hard, that his business skills can be used against him on the political front," says Eric Kriss, a Bain Capital founding partner who was secretary of administration and finance when Romney was governor. (Romney did get a laugh line out of his defeat: "I was once campaigning in a poor section in Boston when a person came up to me and said, 'What are you doing here? This is Kennedy country.' I looked around at the vacant storefronts and boarded-up windows and replied, 'Yeah, it looks like Kennedy country.'")

Romney returned to Bain yet again, but one person who worked with him says he seemed "on the lookout for the next thing that would make him a bigger star." That would be the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. As early as 1999, a financial crisis was looming: The Games were mired in a bribery scandal and were running a $379 million deficit. Romney was asked to step in, and he immediately slashed budgets and boosted sponsorships. And since the Games were held just months after Sept. 11, 2001, he oversaw a huge security apparatus. He now says it was one of the most difficult things he'd ever done, comparing it to "arranging 17 Super Bowls a day for 17 days." The Games ended up with a $100 million profit. President Bush publicly praised his management skills, giving him his first brush with national fame.

On a roll, Romney then won the Massachusetts governor's race as a moderate Republican - socially liberal, fiscally conservative. He took office at the beginning of 2003. His administration had three major victories: the health plan, essentially a plausible blueprint for establishing universal health care; an inventive environmental plan (which he backed away from at the last minute, afraid it would be seen as too "Al Gore lefty," as a former advisor puts it); and a balanced budget.

Romney had big plans to revamp education too, but in 2005 "he started to drift off," says the advisor. One reason: He became president of the Republican Governors' Association, another national platform, which allowed him to travel the country supporting gubernatorial candidates. In 2006, the last year of his term, the Boston Globe noted that he'd spent 212 days out of state. Romney was already on his next goal: the presidency.

Mitt-a-thon

This past January Romney raised $6.5 million in one day. He had invited 400 wealthy supporters to a "Mitt-a-Thon" at the Boston convention center and asked them to phone friends and business contacts for donations. While Supertramp's "Give a Little Bit" played, four gigantic TV screens hung from the ceiling broadcast various moments of Mitt magnificence - the Olympics, speeches, etc. There were 40 call centers, each with state-of-the-art technology. "I call it the blitzkrieg fundraiser," says Alex Vogel, a Republican lobbyist with no ties to Romney or other candidates. Vogel notes it was Romney's way of conveying, "Hey, I'm for real."

Given Romney's business acumen, it's no surprise he's assembled one of the most successful political money machines ever. "Romney is an incredibly aggressive and efficient fundraiser," says Vogel, who attributes it to his private-sector skills. In April, when he was still relatively unknown nationally, Romney made headlines when his campaign reported it had blown past the rest of the Republican field and raised $23 million in the first quarter, rivaling Hillary Clinton's $26 million and surpassing Barack Obama's $21 million.

Romney got serious about fundraising three years ago when he started the Commonwealth PAC (political action committee). It's a so-called leadership PAC - that is, the money donated is supposed to push issues; by law, it can't be used to fund the founder's political campaign. In practice, a leadership PAC "can be a bit of a personal slush fund," says Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. The money is often used in a candidate's "exploratory committee" phase to finance travel and staff. Last year Romney used Commonwealth PAC bucks to visit Guantánamo Bay and Iraq.

Romney aggressively took advantage of a loophole that allows donors to contribute to PAC affiliates in multiple states all at one time. He set up affiliate PACs in Iowa, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Michigan. (The most an individual can contribute to a federal PAC like Commonwealth is $5,000 annually; state PACs have different, typically higher limits. A dozen states, including Michigan and Iowa, have no limit at all.) That way Romney supporters were able to spread their contributions among the various state PACs. Last year, for example, Lee Munder, a Florida investment advisor, gave $5,000 to Romney's federal PAC, $5,000 to his New Hampshire affiliate, $18,250 to his Iowa affiliate, $18,250 to the one in Michigan, and $3,500 to his South Carolina fund, according to the Commonwealth PAC. (Romney may not be able to use PAC money to fund his campaign now that he's an official candidate, but he can still dole it out to state Republican candidates to build his power base.)

Romney has also raised more money than any other candidate, Republican or Democrat, over the Internet. In the first quarter ComMitt.com brought in $7.2 million, vs. $6.9 million for Obama and $4.2 million for Clinton - and Romney got more glowing headlines, this time about his red-hot "Netroots" effort. But those numbers were more tactical dexterity than common-man groundswell: The Romney campaign, it turns out, was directing big donors to its website. "It's an innovative use of the Internet," says Patrick Ruffini, an e-campaign expert who recently worked for Giuliani. "We've been focused on a new audience. But you can't neglect the importance of using technology to activate an existing base of supporters."

No matter how whiz-bang Romney's fundraising tactics are, his biggest stumbling block is probably himself. In Alton, N.H., on Memorial Day, Romney is meeting with veterans at the American Legion. It's a flag-waving, mostly blue-collar crowd; many of the older veterans are dripping with military bling. Romney takes the mike and begins his rapid, well-rehearsed talk. He moves from issue to issue, including how "violent jihadists are waging a global war against the United States," and "I want to see more immigration in our country, but more legal immigration and less illegal immigration."

Then it's Q&A time. A few people want to know how to solve personal issues: a son who hasn't received medical benefits since he returned from Iraq; a father who can't get admitted to a VA hospital. Romney looks uneasy. "I'm not an elected official right now," he says, "but if I were ..." He then goes on to say he'd make veteran health care a priority and instructs the people in need to contact their Congressman.

Back at Lake Winnipesaukee, it's an idyllic setting. Romney's Colonial-style house has glorious views of the shimmering lake and the White Mountains beyond. His son Tagg, 37, who seems like a more laid-back version of Mitt and works on the campaign, is running around the yard in a swimsuit and T-shirt with his two dogs. The photographer is about ready, and it's Tagg's turn to cajole the candidate to loosen up. He respectfully asks Dad to lose the jacket. Romney refuses. "All they'll see is my blinding white shirt," he says.

Memorial Day is coming to an end. The grandkids are gathering up toys from the yard. Neighbors have fired up the grill. And there's Mitt Romney, suited up and ready for business.

Telis Demos and Doris Burke contributed to this article. 

From the July 9, 2007 issue