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2008 Presidential for March 07, 2007
Romney in Tennessee
I had the great fortune of meeting my second Republican Presidential candidate yesterday. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney had a meet-and-greet following what was rumored to be a very successful private fundraising session last night. Romney spoke a crowded room of about 75 Republican grassroots leaders as well as key Republican fundraisers, at an event apparently put together by big GOP donor and a member of the Romney fundraising team Ted Welch.
Romney is decidedly sleek - just enough to make you feel uncomfortable meeting him if you haven't accomplished as much in life as he has. I talked previously about an air of untouchability - and like Barack Obama, that's an air Romney has. But it is not a noxious odor and the good news is Romney seems to know it's there. But that didn't stop the act of meeting him from being a study in paradox. On the one hand, he approached a group of us gathered near the finger foods - and said simply "I'm Mitt Romney, nice to meet you" as if his relatively low name identification was holding true among this group of political insiders or that we couldn't figure out he was the guest of honor notwithstanding the legions of aides closely trailing his beeline to the snacks.
The real paradox, though is that unlike Huckabee, I can actually imagine Romney being President of the United States and yet he has one of the slimest resumes among the Republican field (which is not to say Romney's resume is slim by any kind of average standard). Romney exudes the optimistic confidence of a man in charge of a room or someone who's a big hit with the ladies - but in a less aw-shucks way than Bill Clinton. Romney is virile, fashionable and rich in a way that if he weren't running for office might make the ladies swoon and the men envious.
The confidence translated almost literally into his remarks - in addition to saying he "couldn't wait to tackle Washington," smartly as if we had already elected the guy, he even referenced confidence as a characteristic that Americans saw in Ronald Reagan. A large part of his introductory remarks could have mirrored Reagan's - his credentials are as a semi-conservative Governor of a liberal state, fundraiser for the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, and Harvard student extraordinare. Like Reagan, the issues that mattered in the short term and the issues that Romney hit on the hardest were economic conservatism. It played delightfully among this decidedly more affluent crowd.
Governor Romney, CEO with three bits of CFO thrown in for good measure. Romney drew a thundered applause when he mentioned how we need to control Washington spending - from earmarks on down the list to tearing the government apart and rebuilding it. It was almost as loud when he transitioned to social issues via campaign donations and criticized McCain-Feingold for another example of Washington taking away "free speech." I'm not sure it would have worked with any other crowd.
Surprisingly, though - Romney also recognized the need for some mention of the conservative troika of social issues - life issues, gay marriage and immigration. Although he never specifically mentioned abortion, Romney surprisingly told the crowd of a his renewed interest in life issues prompted by an examination of cloning. Gay marriage naturally followed and Romney staked out his opposition to gay marriage in a state that allowed gay unions. Interestingly also he made it a point to mention his involvement in preventing the Catholic Church from being cut off from adoptions because of rules requiring allowed child placement among gay couples. Then there was immigration - we need to resonably control our borders and "I'm not for amnesty."
The Tennessee connection is this - we previously reported that Marsha Blackburn was behind Romney, but it wasn't evident until last night just how much she was behind Romney. Marsha's entire campaign apparatus was well represented, from her husband on down the line to her Middle Tennessee field director. Other luminaries spotted in the crowd include radio jock Steve Gill and in addition to and including Welch, several long-time supporters and campaign staffers of Sen. Lamar Alexander.
Romney has a good shot in Tennessee if for no other reason than who he has locked up. Looking out on the crowd, the faces looking back were the faces that regularly pick the right horse in Tennessee. Romney is the Washington outsider who can raise enough money to shake charges that he isn't socially conservative enough. Sound familar? It should, that's the strategy that worked for Bob Corker.
Great, thoughtful piece...but I couldn't help but react to the "one of the slimmest resumes" comment. Maybe this is true from a pure political resume standpoint, but I think that his resume as a chief executive is the deepest of all of them. And after all, we're choosing the chief executive of the largest enterprise in the world.
Romney wasn't just a "fundraiser for the Olympics in Salt Lake City" -- he was a CEO that turned them around when they were about to go down the tubes, and then saved them again when 9/11 threatened to make Americans stay home from mass public events.
Romney wasn't just the head of a consulting firm. He saved one of the top strategy firms in the country from the brink of bankruptcy after the founders took too much money out of the company.
He wasn't just head of a big venture capital firm. He literally built it from scratch and turned it into one of the three or four most successful venture capital firms in history, founding such business successes as Staples along the way.
And he wasn't just governor of a state...he saved Massachusetts from near financial collapse. And did it in the face of a legislature that politically stacked against him from the start, by virtue of the fact that they're 85% Democrats.
Too often I think, during this early "insider" part of the campaign, we measure a man (or woman) by the length and nature of the political resume. Especially when we are in such deep need of competent executive leadership in this country, we should be looking at the executive leadership resumes as well. And Romney's executive leadership resume is right up there with legends like Jack Welch.
Posted by: NewsMan2008 | March 9, 2007 05:50 AM