By Hal Boyd
Tuesday, November 28, 2017
Political commentator Bill Kristol opened his speech to
the Sutherland Institute’s annual gala in Salt Lake City earlier this month by
noting how delighted he was to have spent time that evening with two of his
favorite politicians: Senator Mike Lee and, of course, “Senator” Mitt Romney.
The crowd’s laughter morphed into approving applause at
Kristol’s winking reference to the prospect of a Romney run. Kristol,
meanwhile, proffered a faux apology to Romney, seated in the audience.
A Dan Jones Utah Policy poll released earlier this year
recorded Romney with an astoundingly high 71/25 percent favorable/unfavorable
rating in Utah. Even 45 percent of Democrats
in the state viewed him favorably. (For perspective, the same poll had the
state’s popular sitting governor, Gary Herbert, at 63/29 favorable/unfavorable,
Senator Mike Lee at 51/33, and Senator Orrin Hatch, whose seat Romney would
theoretically be seeking, at 46/47.) And among self-identified “active” Utah
Mormons — perhaps the state’s most important voting bloc — Romney’s split rose
to 88/10.
If the steel-jawed, Olympic-saving septuagenarian becomes
Utah’s next senator, he would for the first time be representing a core
constituency in near-total sync with his own views. And his supporters contend
that this dynamic could make for his finest political hour.
He’ll be largely free to dispense with political
maneuvering, the thinking goes. He’ll finally be able to focus on what he does
best: problem solving. His reservoir of support will afford him the luxury of
speaking his mind, and he will no longer face the inevitable political
calculations that come with eyeing some future presidential bid. He will, in
short, be free to be himself: Mitt, the conservative Mormon family man with a
penchant for business, politics, and pragmatism in the service of the body politic.
Fairly or not, Romney’s political opponents have long
labeled him inauthentic, a flip-flopper, or, in the characteristically florid
prose of Rick Santorum, “a well-oiled weather vane.” A more charitable reading,
of course, is that Romney made compromises in order to plow a decidedly
difficult political path as a conservative in deeply blue Massachusetts.
In 1994, Romney — a Mormon boy born in Michigan —
audaciously launched his political career by challenging Ted Kennedy in
Kennedy-loving, Catholic-heavy Massachusetts, with its well-earned reputation
as the most liberal state in the union. To have any prayer, Romney had to scoot
as close to Kennedy as possible on social issues without causing the bracketed
R after his name to teeter.
He lost soundly anyway, but, eight years later his
reputation as a moderate and a problem solver (he had just turned the
scandal-ridden Salt Lake City Olympics into a smashing success) propelled him
to Beacon Hill as Massachusetts’s 70th Governor. From there, the standard pro-Romney
narrative is that he alchemized a $3 billion deficit into a surplus, signed
“Romneycare” into law and, after a chunk of concrete collapsed and killed a
driver in an I-90 tunnel-construction project, swiftly ended a vacation,
audited the situation, and took to the airwaves in a kind of crisis-management
tour de force that shored up shaken public confidence in the project.
Whatever his accomplishments and failures in
Massachusetts, his ideological appeals to left-leaning constituents came back
to haunt him during his bid for the 2012 Republican nomination. In a post-Tea
Party climate, Romney had to tack to the right in order to compete for the
nomination. No longer angling for left-leaning independents in the Bay State,
he characterized himself as a “severely conservative Governor” at CPAC. This
solidified his reputation with the press as an opportunist, but it also
effectively signaled to conservatives across the country that — whatever his
past political sins — he could pass their purity test.
If Romney runs for Senate — and he’s said to be waiting
for Hatch to decide one way or the other on retirement before making a final
choice — it would be an unexpected bookend to his decades in politics. He began
his career running for Senate in a state where he had little support or name
recognition. Now, more than two decades later, he would be running for the same
office in a state where he’s among the most popular and well-known politicians.
If the prevailing thought among admirers is correct —
that his true skill is solving problems, rather than politicking — then running
for the Senate from Utah would allow Romney to play to his strengths. That’s
not to say that if he were successful his term in Washington would be without
cost. It would undoubtedly be less pleasant to plunge once more into the breach
of America’s sclerotic Congress than to stay home and enjoy time with the
Romney’s ever-expanding brood of grandchildren. Nor would it be simple to
navigate a Republican party led by Donald Trump, with whom he has had a
complicated relationship in the recent past.
But for boosters the potential upsides are hard to
ignore: A Senator Mitt Romney would no longer need to flatter. He would no
longer need to pander, jockey for position, or map out some future bid for
higher office. Rather, he would at last be free to find solutions to the
nation’s challenges with the backing of a base that seems to trust him far more
than most. After a career spent straining to reassure an unending string of
wary constituencies, that would be a relief.
More importantly, many now feel it might also be good for
the country.
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