candidacy and an initial suspicion that it was just a stalking horse for keeping his options open. She barely survived a primary against a conservative opponent, then lost badly in the general election to incumbent Democrat Philip A. Hart. Romney blamed others for his wife having entered the race, when he had been the major force behind it. In late 1970, after opposition to Open Communities reached a peak, Nixon again decided that Romney should go. Still reluctant to dismiss him, Nixon tried to get Romney to resign by forcing him to capitulate on a series of policy issues. Romney surprised both Nixon and Haldeman by agreeing to back off his positions, and Nixon kept him as HUD secretary. Nixon remarked privately afterwards, "[Romney] talks big but folds under pressure." Puzzled by Nixon's lack of apparent ideological consistency across different areas of the government, Romney told a friend, "I don't know what the president believes in. Maybe he doesn't believe in anything", an assessment shared by others both inside and outside the administration. For his work as Secretary of the Housing and Urban Development, in March 1972 Romney was awarded the Republican of the Year Award by the centrist Republican organization Ripon Society. In spring 1972, the FHA was struck by scandal. Since the passage of the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 and the creation of the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), it had been responsible for helping the poor buy homes in inner-city areas via government-backed mortgages. These were financed by mortgage-backed securities, the first issues of which Romney had announced in 1970. A number of FHA employees, along with a number of real estate firms and lawyers, were indicted for a scheme in which the value of cheap inner-city homes was inflated and they were sold to black buyers who could not really afford them, based on using those government-backed mortgages. The government was stuck for the bad loans when owners defaulted, as the properties were overvalued and could not be resold at inflated prices. Assessments of the overall cost of the scandal were as high as $2 billion. Romney conceded that HUD had been unprepared to deal with speculators and had not been alert to earlier signs of illegal activity at the FHA. The FHA scandal gave Nixon the ability to shut down HUD's remaining desegregation efforts with little political risk; by January 1973,