Mitt Romney

Exquisitely-coiffured Governor Romney during his Blue Period.

God, guns, and freedom U.S. Politics

Starting arguments over Thanksgiving dinner

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“”The main problem with trying to distance yourself from Romney is you don't know in which direction to head. Is it Governor Romney, pro-choice and advocate of what looks like Obamacare? Or is it Candidate Romney who is opposed to both those things? Is it Primary Romney, pandering to the social conservatives and warmongers? Or is it Late Campaign Romney who thinks there might be a place for people who are outside the mainstream and who just wants everyone to get along? Is it Private Equity Romney who wants the US government to get out of emergency relief and turn it over to the private sector? Or is it this week's Romney who thinks FEMA is just great in its response to Sandy?

—BlackAcre

Willard Mitt "Mittens" Romney (1947–) was the best only hope the Republican Party had to defeat Barack Obama in the 2012 US Presidential Election and is now a senator for Utah.

Romney's claims to fame are saving the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics from rampant corruption and introducing a prototype of the Affordable Care Act to Massachusetts in 2006. However, he is probably most notable for his perfect hair.

Romney's father, George Romney, served as Governor of Michigan and later as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The younger Romney served as governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 2003 to 2007. He also ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Romney announced in late August that his campaign would "not be dictated by fact checkers." This may have been a less-than-prudent move on his part, as the fact-checkers ultimately wound up pounding every noxious lie he was caught in into a thin paste of noxious pasty lying stuff.

While he won the GOP presidential nomination in 2012, he did not enjoy enthusiastic support from his party's rank and file, and critics on the right often painted him as a RINO. Romney is a man of deep conviction who holds fast to his principles unless it is convenient to abandon them, leading The Economist to somewhat charitably characterize him as "several vertebrae short of a backbone."

Romney made a comeback in 2018 when Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) announced that he would be retiring later in the year and endorsed Romney to take his spot in the Senate. He officially launched his campaign for the Senate on February 16, 2018. He won the primary on June 26, 2018, and, since he was a Mormon Republican running in Utah, easily won the general election. He likes to play "good cop" to the more explicitly Trumpist Republicans while still advocating for nigh-identical policies, subsequently being praised as a "rare moderate conservative" because the bar for credibility in American politics (and moderation among Republicans) really is that low.

Religion

Romney's membership in the Mormon Church was an element of controversy in the run-up to both the 2008 and 2012 primaries. His faith was at first thought to be a substantial handicap to his candidacy as 22% of Americans say they would not vote for a Mormon as president (though JFK was elected despite similar opposition to Catholicism at the time). The critical question for Romney and the Republican Party perhaps was: What proportion of Republicans would prefer a comfortable chair in front of a television rather than go out and vote for a Mormon? In the end, though, it didn't matter.

He avoided the Vietnam draft for several years through studying and Mormon missionary work. That being said, he didn't entirely avoid danger, getting seriously injured in an auto accident in France during this time. Somewhat hypocritically, his successful draft-dodging also did not stop him from protesting in favor of drafting other young people. Another glaring hypocrisy associated with Romney's draft-dodging was that, while young African-American U.S. soldiers were dying in Vietnam saving Mitt from Communism, Romney was vacationing evangelizing in France regarding a religion that considered those same African-Americans unfit for priesthood. The U.S. media studiously avoided commenting on this during Romney's presidential runs.

Romney later boasted that he would bomb Iran.

As a political grandstander, he was firm in pointing out that in the West, "marriage" had meant "one man and one woman" for over two thousand years, not just since 1890 when the Mormon church leaders caved before the U.S. government seizure of all their property experienced a divine revelation and gave up polygamy. Despite being a Mormon, he has had fewer wives than Newt Gingrich, Ronald Reagan, Rudolph Giuliani or Donald Trump, as he has only married one woman, to whom he remains married to this day.

2008 campaign

In 2008, Romney attempted to woo social conservatives by running in the Republican Presidential primary as a right-winger, a significant departure from the moderate positions he'd held during his days in Massachusetts. He flip-flopped on abortion, gun control and a whole lot of other hot-button issues (see below). Romney also claimed that he'd seen his father march with Martin Luther King. However, it was proved that they had been in different places at the time. This earned him the coveted "Pinocchio Award" for lying from the Washington Post, as well as a "Pants on Fire" rating from PolitiFact. He also wanted to show everyone how tough he is by doubling the size of the Guantanamo Bay prison.

Romney's 2008 campaign was surprisingly free of personal scandals and embarrassing revelations. The only notable mini-scandal involved one of Romney's senior aides, Director of Communications Jay Garrity, who took an unconventional approach to handling the press: he and a few other campaign workers dressed up as policemen and used fake badges to order reporters away from events and avoid highway tolls.

Mitt Romney suspended his campaign on February 7, 2008, after seeing his results in the Super Tuesday primaries, saying that staying in the race "would make it easier for Senator Clinton or Senator Barack Obama to win" and that his campaign would "be a part of aiding surrender to terror." He then endorsed John McCain on February 14 (mmm... Valentine's Day). This must have impressed McCain as he later considered Romney as a potential choice for a running mate.

2012 campaign

Romney took another shot at the presidency, but his record for flip-flopping made it hard to ascertain precisely what he would have done in the office.

Romney had hurdles to overcome; he's not very popular among his own party's base and tends not to come across as the type of guy people like. That said, throughout the primary campaign he was portrayed by the media as the presumptive nominee, most likely because almost all of the other Republican candidates were batshit crazies who wouldn't stand a chance in the general election.

Romney's drive to secure the nomination did not come cheap. He spent four times as much money per vote (and three times as much per delegate won) as Rick Santorum. At times, he did outraise Barack Obama, who raises money well, both in smaller increments from a broad donor base and in large donations to so-called "Super PACs."

Primary and caucus highlights

Romney's campaign for the Republican nomination revealed the deep ideological fault lines in the party:

• Iowa Republicans were pretty much evenly split between Romney and Rick Santorum. Although Santorum won a narrow victory after a recount, the margin was a mere 34 votes.
• Despite the caliber of the opposition, the Bible Belt state South Carolina had little confidence in him, throwing their weight behind Newt Gingrich.
• Romney did well in Florida, a state whose panhandle is in the Bible Belt but has become a permanent swing state.

However, a few hiccups aside, once Santorum pulled out (heh), it became clear that Romney would secure the nomination. In effect, his faction — finance capital — once again subordinated the other factions (the Religious Right and various other globules of bigotry) as useful idiots.

Obama

On May 31, 2011, Romney called Barack Obama "one of the most ineffective Presidents" he's ever seen and argued that he could beat him in the general election. That sufficed at the time to set him apart from the rest of the field, making him the closest thing to a frontrunner. For the 2012 campaign, Romney apparently gave up on trying to sell himself as a social conservative and based his candidacy mostly on criticizing Obama's handling of the economy:

“”Obama did not cause this recession, but he made it worse... it will be essential to have a person who understands how the economy works, understands what it takes to create and grow jobs, in the White House.

After Romney made the assertion in his announcement speech, fact-checkers demolished it. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession ended in June of 2009. The Associated Press, meanwhile, pointed out that GDP picked up modestly after Obama took office, adding that while unemployment is still very high, "the recession officially ended six months into his presidency,” which is obviously an improvement. Yet Romney was cheerfully repeating the bogus claim again. What is being seen here are the limits of fact-checking — something rediscovered every election cycle:

1. Candidates, party committees, and outside groups make false claims.
2. Media fact-checkers go to work and debunk the claims.
3. The candidates and groups go right on making them anyway.
4. Reporters stop pointing out that they’re false.

Romney seemed to hope that a lie repeated often enough will eventually be believed, and he might be right on that account. When challenged, he tried to deny he had ever said it.

Romney-care problem

“”Did someone say hideously dishonest? Mitt Romney is up to the task.

—Fred Clark

Mitt Romney faced harsh criticism for stating that nothing is "more misguided and egregious" than the Obama administration's federal health care overhaul. He then went on to state, "Obamacare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy, and it is bad for America’s families,” Romney said. “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the Post Office." Despite his relentless attacks on Obamacare, on September 9, 2012, Romney said on Meet the Press that there are some things about the recent health care reform that he liked and would continue under his own plan, including letting young adults keep their coverage that they get from their parents' plan and "[making] sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage."

This is because Massachusetts' health care overhaul he signed into law in 2006 served as the model for the federal legislation. And the Democrats have even thanked Romney on their website for the model he gave them. Romney proudly touts the law in his list of achievements while refusing to acknowledge large similarities between the two laws. When pushed about how he stated it was unconstitutional at a federal level, he pleaded it was different because it's a state plan.

Trying to help uninsured sick people get better is a serious weakness in the eyes of some Republicans as The Onion notes.

Unemployment

Apart from bashing Obama, Romney also frequently promised voters that the unemployment situation would dramatically improve once he was in office. As late as February 1, he was promising an era of prosperity. How exactly does he plan to get people working? Mitt just said he'd "focus, focus, focus." That certainly sounds impressive, but what will Romney focus on? Mitt did not say anything clear about that. He’d just "focus, focus, focus" on something or other and somehow that will create jobs. Since he already made the same promise during his tenure in Massachusetts, it was worth checking out his record:

“”Massachusetts was one of just four states that by the time of the financial crisis still had not recovered all the jobs they had lost during the 2001 recession. And, as Romney’s opponents have pointed out, the state ranked 47th in job creation during his term.

—Washington Post

Despite this less-than-stellar achievement, his supporters still hoped that the whole country would fare better under his leadership than Massachusetts did; his opponents, on the other hand, argued that if Mitt Romney’s an economic "heavyweight," we’re in trouble.

Lying about job creation

WaPo gave Romney the Pinocchio award again because he lied about firms under his control creating jobs in the private sector. Romney further lied about jobs falling in the auto industry under Obama when auto jobs in fact increased:

“”But since January 2009, when Obama took office, overall there has been an increase in jobs. The number of jobs hit a low point in November 2009, but then it has slowly inched upward so that Obama can point to the auto industry and says there has been a net gain.

—Washington Post

Even worse, the Romney campaign then claimed the Obama bailout was his idea.

Lying about 47% of Americans

“”The only person who has seen Romney's taxes is John McCain and he took one look and picked Sarah Palin.

—Democratic strategist James Carville

Romney did not know he was being taped when he said "Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax," they "believe that they are victims", won't "take personal responsibility and care for their lives", and expect the state to provide. 47%, Romney said, will vote for Obama come what may and Romney will disregard them.

Ironically, he got 47% of the vote in the actual election. Meaning, 47% were actually willing to vote for Romney, even though they found out he insulted them and didn't care about them. Romney epically flip-flopped again when on October 4, 2012, he admitted on Fox News that, "Clearly in a campaign with hundreds if not thousands of speeches and question-and-answer sessions, now and then you're going to say something that doesn't come out right, in this case, I said something that's just completely wrong."

Regarding paying income taxes, Romney earned $21.7 million in 2011. While his marginal tax rate would have been approximately 35%, he admitted during his 2012 bid that he paid only 14% thanks to exploiting capital gains loopholes.

Cutting spending

Romney campaigned on a promise to cut public spending, eliminate some government departments, and merge others. Romney has been cagey about exactly how he would enact budget cuts. He told private sponsors a bit about his plans when he had no idea reporters were listening in; what the reporters overheard heard led to speculation that education and public housing may be targeted for cuts should Romney win the election.

Same-sex marriage

Romney opposed same-sex marriage or civil unions that are marriage in all but name — supporting some partnership benefits such as hospital visitation rights. Romney further opposed federal recognition of gay marriage and gay civil unions. He did garner the support of the National Organization for Marriage. Ten years later, he did vote for the Respect for Marriage Act, which repealed DOMA and codified Obergefell v. Hodges into federal law.

How to lose gracefully

“”The objectors have claimed they are doing so on behalf of the voters. Have an audit, they say, to satisfy the many people who believe that the election was stolen. Please! No Congressional led audit will ever convince those voters, particularly when the President will continue to claim that the election was stolen. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth. That is the burden, and the duty, of leadership. The truth is that President-elect Biden won this election. President Trump lost. Scores of courts, the President’s own Attorney General, and state election officials both Republican and Democrat have reached this unequivocal decision.

—Senator Mitt Romney, 8 years after losing his own campaign

After all was said and done, Romney's campaign ended about fifteen minutes after the West Coast polls closed, in one of the quickest "dead heat" races in history, with Oregon and/or Ohio (depending on what station you were watching) putting Obama over the top and not a recount threat in sight.

Romney's campaign conducted its own polls, which showed Romney as the favored candidate and dismissed as biased the independent polls that gave the advantage to Obama. Yeah. Guess how that went? Reportedly, Romney and his people were genuinely shocked; the campaign hadn't even bothered to write a concession speech and was forced to improvise one. (Never tempt the wrath from high atop the thing.)

If you were following the election at the time, you might remember many smug talking heads crowing about how the Hispanic vote was going to skew Republican because they were so socially conservative. It turns out abortion mattered less to most people of color than being treated like human beings. His consultants made the same assumption other conservative pundits and pollsters made: that 2008 was a fluke and 2010 was a return to the norm of turnout. When you put your personal ideology first, it leads to incorrect priors feeding incorrect conclusions. Once the mistake was apparent, they just kept skewing the polling in Mitt's favor because there is no benefit to them relaying him bad news months ahead of time and losing their fees.

In his concession, Mitt shared his insider perspective on why the campaign fell short: Welfare checks! Gotta hand it to Mitt, this one might be his biggest whopper yet. Over time, it metastasized into a loopy conspiracy that Dear Leader posted Black Panthers at key voting sites to intimidate and harass voters, thereby throwing to the election. (For the GOP, "one black guy opening the door for people" is voter intimidation.)

Ann Romney also grumbled something about the "media" colluding against them, whatever that meant.

Political positions

Romney apparently is a politician and, as such, presents a strong, principled position from time to time. The trouble is his principles change so much it becomes hard to tell what he stands for or will stand for in the future.

Issue	Flip	Flop
Abortion	"I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose. This choice is a deeply personal one. Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government’s." (2002)	"I am pro-life. I believe that abortion is the wrong choice except in cases of incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother." (2005)
Gun control	"That's not going to make me the hero of the NRA. I don't line up with the NRA." (1994) "We do have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them. I won't chip away at them; I believe they protect us and provide for our safety." (2002)	"I have a gun of my own. I go hunting myself. I'm a member of the NRA and believe firmly in the right to bear arms." (2008) - The part about owning a gun was a lie, by the way.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell	"Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military is a fine first step, but must ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation’s military." (1994)	"As for military policy and the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy, I trust the counsel of those in uniform who have set these policies over a dozen years ago. I agree with President Bush’s decision to maintain this policy and I would do the same." (2006)
Stem cell research	"He supports stem cell research on new and existing lines, in both private and federally funded settings.” - Romney's spokesman in 2004	"The governor has never been a proponent of expanded federal funding or state funding for embryonic stem cell research.” - Romney's spokesman in 2007

Etch-a-Sketch

In an interview on CNN, a campaign staffer for Romney responded to questions regarding Romney's far-right positions during the primary hurting him in the general election by stating that Romney can "reset":

“”It's almost like an Etch-a-Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

—Eric Fehrnstrom

The obvious redundancy of "restart all over again" aside, opponents Santorum and Gingrich jumped on this gaffe to show further how Romney's political views change with the wind. Romney later backtracked from his staffer's statement, saying his political positions would remain the same during the general election. The statement and its backlash, however, did cause a temporary spike in the stock price of Ohio Arts, the creator of the Etch-a-Sketch as well as a 15-fold increase in sales on Amazon.com. The comparison also drew fire from Rachel Maddow who remarked that Ohio Arts was now producing the Etch-a-Sketch in China at substandard wages — even by Chinese standards — a move that had been previously decried by major purchaser Toys "R" Us, a company owned by Bain Capital, which Romney co-founded.

Miscellaneous weirdness

Bullying a blind teacher

Young Romney pretended to help a blind teacher; he guided the blind man through one set of doors, then laughed hysterically as the teacher bumped into the second set of closed doors.

Cutting hair

During the campaign, allegations emerged that when Romney was 17, at the elite Cranbrook School, he helped gang up on a boy who was visibly gender-nonconforming and rumored to be gay. While his cronies held the boy down, Romney forcibly cut his hair.

“”It's a haunting memory, when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye, you never forget it.

—Philip Maxwell, one of Romney's classmates.

Romney claims he forgot about that, though the victim certainly did not. Romney also viewed poorer students with disdain, "souring" upon learning that a classmate commuted from east Detroit.

Mitt the Ripper

Romney argues that "corporations are people." How did he treat those people? As one analysis put it, as head of Bain Capital, he "...bought companies, carved them up and got rid of what he couldn’t use."

Subsidiaries include LexCorp, Weyland-Yutani, and Umbrella Corporation

Mitt originally co-founded Bain Capital with investments from Central American war criminals.

Mitt the superpatriot

To kick off the campaign season, Mitt toasted his wealthiest donors aboard his yacht, the Cracker Bay, as a Cayman Islands flag fluttered overhead.

One law for the rich and another for the poor

If a mother is poor and on welfare, she should be forced to go out and work because Mitt thinks work is more dignified. However, if a mother is wealthy (like his own wife) and is staying at home to raise children, then that is hard, dignified work and an acceptable career choice.

Mitt the dog lover?

Is it kind to keep a dog in a carrier, strap it to the roof of a station wagon, and keep it there for the duration of a long road trip, even when the animal shits itself in sheer terror? Romney's critics don't think so. One even went so far as to do the same with a fake dog and was "successfully" pulled over by police.

In 2024, Romney more-or-less copped to admitting that what he did was bad, but not as bad as what Kristi Noem did, saying in reference to her, "I didn’t shoot my dog."

Unfortunate coincidence

A ship named the "HMS Romney" was once used to enforce import taxes in the North American colonies.

Cold fusion

“”I do believe in basic science. I believe in participating in space. I believe in analysis of new sources of energy. I believe in laboratories, looking at ways to conduct electricity with — with cold fusion, if we can come up with it. It was the University of Utah that solved that. We somehow can’t figure out how to duplicate it.

Diplomacy? What's that?

In July 2012, Romney went on an international trip to portray himself as worldly and presidential. It was an unmitigated failure, with Romney insulting just about everyone he engaged with. While at Downing Street, the United Kingdom's seat of government, Romney forgot the name of the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, referring to him throughout the conversation as "Mr. Leader."

Pwned by Trump

In March 2016, Romney unequivocally stated that Trump was unfit to serve as POTUS, yet after Trump was elected, Romney went hat-in-hand and ineffectively kissed ass interviewed to be Secretary of State in November 2016. By February 2018, Romney had happily accepted Trump's endorsement for his campaign to carpetbag be a Senator of Utah. He later got back at him, however ineffectively, by voting to convict Trump in his Senate impeachment trial on one of the two counts. He was the only Republican to do so, and though Trump was still acquitted - and never had any chance of being convicted to begin with; one assumes it is the thought that counts. He also voted to convict Trump in his second(!) impeachment, after two years of proving himself to be one of the few remotely consistent anti-Trump conservatives.

See also

• Paul Ryan, his running mate in 2012.
• Whacker
• John McCain - Whose model as a "maverick republican" Romney seems intent on aping.

External links

• A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney
• The best of #RomneyShambles
• We couldn't prepare for Gmail!
• Unemployed man blogs about a family trip to Utah

References

United States 2008 presidential election articles on RationalWiki

Topics: Debate:Religious beliefs and public office - Mission accomplished - Same-sex marriage - United States Electoral College - Values Voter Debate 2007

Parties: Constitution Party - Democratic Party - Green Party of the United States - Libertarian Party - Republican Party
Candidates: Baldwin (Con) - Barr (Lib) - Brownback (R) - Clinton (D) - Giuliani (R) - Gravel (D) - Huckabee (R) - Keyes (R) - McCain (R) - McKinney (Green) - Obama (D) - Paul (R) - Romney (R) • Running mates: Biden (D) - Palin (R)

Winner: Barack Obama

United States 2012 presidential election articles on RationalWiki

Topics: Affordable Care Act - Benghazi attack - Debate:Religious beliefs and public office - Same-sex marriage - United States Electoral College
Parties: Americans Elect - Constitution Party - Democratic Party - Green Party of the United States - Libertarian Party - Prohibition Party - Republican Party (primaries • Tea Party)
Candidates: Bachmann (R) - Cain (R) - Gingrich (R) - Johnson (Lib) - Obama (D) - Perry (R) - Paul (R) - Romney (R) - Santorum (R) - Stein (Green) • Running mates: Biden (D) - Ryan (R)
Winner: Barack Obama (incumbent)