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"FacebookPinterest\n\n \"I never imagined that I would be running for president of the United States.... I spent my life in business. I sort of backed into getting involved in politics.\"\u2014Mitt Romney, Council Bluffs, Iowa, January 2012\n\n On July4, 1962, 15-year-old Mitt Romney delivered his first-ever stump speech. The venue was a high school football stadium in Lansing, Michigan, where his father, George, was campaigning for governor. Someone informed the candidate that he was way behind schedule and needed to depart for another event. But, campaign staffers fretted, who would speak to the crowd in George Romney's place?\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n See a Young Romney's Article in Read  \n\n \"I wasn't nervous\u2014just panicky,\" young Mitt later wrote for Read, a biweekly youth magazine. \"Luckily I had about five minutes during another person's speech to try to think of something to say.... Naturally, the minute I stood up at the microphones, everything I'd thought of dropped out of my mind.... But once I got the first words out, it wasn't bad at all. I talked about ten minutes on what the Fourth of July meant to me, and the people seemed to like it. One thing is sure; I never realized before how tough it is to be a candidate.\"\n\n It was clear, however, that Mitt loved campaigning alongside his dad, whom he plainly worshipped. Of the four Romney children, George would observe that the youngest, Willard Mitt, was, not unlike the father, \"never still, mentally or physically.\" At the age of 11, Mitt built his first miniature all-metal car, prompting the proud American Motors Corporation CEO to write to a relative that \"he insists that [designing automobiles] is what he is going to do when he grows up.\" The lad shadowed his father everywhere: on morning jogs (in those pre-Nike days, George wore wingtip shoes wrapped in duct tape, yet as Mitt would write, \"he runs over three miles, and isn't easy to keep up with\"), on the golf course (where George whacked away at the ball \"with an unorthodox but effective swing that has been likened to that of a farmer killing a snake,\" as one reporter put it), and, whenever he could, on the campaign trail. At local events, Mitt would set up a booth and hand out buttons. Often he and his mother, Lenore, would drive together in a small bus and pass out literature. \"I haven't kissed any babies,\" he wrote in Read, \"but every book at school probably has a Romney sticker on it.\"\n\n The teen ended his article with a seasoned politician's head fake. \"Even though these past few months have been fun,\" he wrote, \"I haven't made any plans to run for public office. I hope very much to become a doctor.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Romney with his future wife, Ann Davies, in 1964.\n\n The more Mitt Romney has immersed himself in politics, the more vigorously he has peddled the narrative\u2014what Newt Gingrich has termed \"pious baloney\"\u2014that politics was just something that the life-long businessman stumbled into, more or less in the manner of a fellow who strolls into his local diner for a cup of coffee in the middle of a stickup and is thereupon transformed, albeit reluctantly, into a civic hero. Romney's selective elucidation of his own biography seems of a piece with his fuzzy ideology. As one of his former senior advisers admits, \"Mitt's flaw is authenticity. Someone who changes his mind can be effective as a business leader or running the Olympics. But when you change your mind on such core issues as abortion, then what? Where's the authenticity?\"\n\n Romney's story line has undergone a few crucial revisions. As recently as February, he told supporters in Nevada, \"I never imagined I would one day run for president of the United States,\" but back in December 2007 he had a different recollection when I asked him when he first thought about taking up residency in the White House. \"It was probably, oh, back when I was with Senator [Bob] Bennett of Utah after the Olympics, when I was governor a couple of years, around 2004,\" he replied. \"He just said to me, 'Y'know, you don't have to decide if you want to be president. But you do have to decide if you want the option to become president.' [In a recent interview, Bennett clarified to me that he first put this in memo form.] And it's like, 'Wow. I'm a one-term governor from Massachusetts. You think I've got that kind of opportunity?'\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Mitt's French Adventure\n\n (Click to see the letter)\n\n Mitt Romney doesn't talk much about his formative years. But the candidate would most certainly count his thirty-month stint as a Mormon missionary in France as a character builder. In June 1968, the 21-year-old was nearly killed in an auto accident. A month later, he was back preaching and cheerily wrote his parents.  \n\n \"But of course,\" Romney went on, \"you know, did it pop into my mind at other times in my life? Of course. But not as a 'Hey, I've really got a shot at doing this,' but more 'This is a serious course for me.' \"\n\n So why did the boy who dreamed of designing cars or practicing medicine instead become the single most driven presidential aspirant of the twenty-first century? Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, gave away the answer to a reporter in 1999, a few years before anyone fully appreciated what it meant. \"Politics,\" she explained, \"is in Mitt's blood.\" Or as Mitt himself would write, \"I had become my father's son.\"\n\n That Mitt would follow in the footsteps of George Romney\u2014who, barely a year after becoming governor of Michigan, acknowledged his presidential ambitions and eventually ran for the high office\u2014should not have surprised anyone who knew father and son. One who saw them together was then&amp;amp;#x2013;Massachusetts governor William Weld. It was in early 1995, and Mitt\u2014who had just lost his Senate race against Ted Kennedy\u2014had notified his fellow Republican that George was in town promoting volunteerism, a subject of interest to Weld. \"Mitt sat on a sofa, and George and I sat in chairs,\" Weld recalled to me. \"George talked about volunteerism. He spoke for an hour, with me occasionally interjecting. Mitt did not say one word the entire hour. But he did do something: He looked at his father the entire time. And if I've ever seen hero worship, it was in his eyes right then.\"\n\n The apt pupil would often repeat his role model's words: \"Never get into politics too young. Only after you've proved yourself somewhere else, and your kids are raised.\" Implicit, however, in George Romney's message was: You will run, and you will serve. George's quest for the presidency ended in early 1968 amid ridicule over his claims that he had been \"brainwashed\" by American generals into supporting the Vietnam War. His political life was later resuscitated by President Nixon, who picked George as his secretary of housing and urban development, and within months of his appointment, Romney openly mulled running for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat. He ultimately declined (his wife, Lenore, ran instead and lost), but after leaving HUD in early 1973, he considered a run for Senate in Utah, even going so far as to rent an apartment in Salt Lake City so as to establish residency. Once again he decided against running.\n\n Still, George Romney never denied who he was or what coursed through his veins. In 1987 he celebrated his eightieth birthday by rounding up more than three dozen members of the Romney brood, among them 40-year-old Mitt, and taking them on a three-day nostalgia tour of Washington, D.C. The trip included one special stop: a private tour of the Oval Office, the endgame George never quite reached.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Romney at Bain Capital in 1993.\n\n Well before the White House visit\u2014and even before he ran to unseat Senator Ted Kennedy in 1994\u2014Romney had politics on the brain. For as Mitt confessed to a Boston reporter during the '94 campaign, he'd had his eye on Kennedy's job \"probably since a year or two after I got here.\" That dates Romney's political aspirations to at least 1973, when he was 26.\n\n Romney finally took the plunge in 1994, after spending the better part of his adulthood as an ecutive at Bain Capital. He was by then a millionaire many times over, his children were teenagers or out of the house, and his Rolodex was stuffed with wealthy conservatives. Indeed, his decision to run was very much made in accordance with \"the Bain Way,\" which Mitt told me involves \"the widest array of options... seeking opinions of very different people... a very rigorous, analytical, deliberative process.\" The data looked quite agreeable in 1994. Democrats nationally were out of favor and would soon be buried under the avalanche of Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution. Meanwhile, Kennedy's at-times oafish conduct had made him a vulnerable figure at home, and voting for a Republican in Massachusetts now seemed a plausible option, thanks to the wildly popular Governor Weld. The state GOP bench was weak. A well-funded and telegenic newcomer could waltz right in.\n\n In 1994, the younger Romney would run a campaign eerily similar his father ran in 1962. During that gubernatorial race, George Romney cast himself\u2014in the language of an internal campaign memo\u2014\"as a citizen running for Governor because he is fed up with hearing Michigan calleda'problemstate.' \"He saw himself as a citizen heeding the cry of his community. What he had done for the ailing American Motors Corporation, he would do for economically battered Michigan. \"We need a million more jobs by 1970, and I know what it takes to create them,\" George would proclaim. Along the way, the job creator's economic record came under attack. As he would write that year to his political mentor Dwight D. Eisenhower, \"My opponents are charging that I am a Wisconsin industrialist who took jobs out of Michigan.\" But the accusation didn't catch on, and George Romney was elected governor that November.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n 1994, during his senatorial campaign.\n\n In 1994, ads for George's son claimed: \"Mitt Romney has spent his life building more than twenty businesses and helping to create more than 10,000 jobs.... Doesn't it make sense for us to have a senator with real-world experience?\" Standing in front of the offices of Staples\u2014at that point his most famous business start-up\u2014the Bain ecutive said of Kennedy, \"I don't think he has a clue how to create jobs.\" (That line, of course, echoes almost verbatim the raison d'etre of Romney's presidential campaign.)\n\n The Kennedy camp responded just as George Romney's 1962 opponents had (and as Mitt's Republican opponents would two decades later), by claiming that the private-equity titan was in fact a destroyer rather than creator of jobs. But unlike George's foes, Kennedy had ammunition\u2014namely, a host of workers who had been laid off by Bain's consolidation of Ampad and who subsequently starred in withering attack ads. Because the layoffs had occurred when Romney was on leave from Bain, he found the charges unworthy of his response\u2014 a fatal error. Just before Kennedy's ads ran, Romney had pulled one point ahead of the senator. After the Ampad blitzkrieg, Mitt's numbers plummeted, and the campaign never recovered.\n\n Near the end of his unsuccessful campaign, Romney held a press conference, and a reporter in the room raised the matter of the candidate's Mormon religion\u2014which, despite Romney's reticence on the subject, had often been raised during the campaign. (One of his primary opponents referred to Mitt during a debate as \"Mr. Mormon.\") The reporter wondered if the family's faith had also come up when his father, George, had run for office.\n\n From the back of the room came a loud voice: \"I think it is absolutely wrong to keep hammering on the religious issues.\" Everyone turned. It was the elder himself. Later, on the day of the election, George bitterly complained, \"There wasn't a thing [Kennedy] said about my son that was true.\"\n\n Mitt reacted to his double-digit defeat with the conviction that politics wasn't for him. \"Under no circumstances\" would he run again, he declared. Just two weeks later, however, he told a reporter that he might challenge the other Massachusetts senator, John Kerry, in 1996. \"Today I say I will leave the door open,\" he said.\n\n For weeks after the defeat, Romney stayed awake at night replaying what had gone wrong. The CEO clearly did not possess the visceral gifts of a retail politician. He was spotty on the issues and became bewildered when his Republican-primary opponents attacked him for having donated to the campaigns of several Democrat friends. (\"They're killing me for this, and it isn't fair!\" a confidante remembers him complaining.) Similarly, he had no response for Kennedy's devastating criticism of Bain for laying off workers. But his greatest mistake, he believed, was hiring a team of political warhorses led by campaign manager Bob Marsh, whom Mitt derisively dubbed Marshmallow. \"Rightly or wrongly, in the back of Mitt's mind, he blames his loss on these classic textbook types,\" a close adviser in his 2002 gubernatorial race told me. \"Next time around, he wanted a campaign that was run like a business.\"\n\n\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n At the 2002 Olympics, where he revived his public life.\n\n Mitt's eight years in the political wilderness were not exactly traumatic. \"Running in '94 was the best thing that could've happened for his business,\" says a political ally from that time, \"because he became that much more of a personality when he'd be out raising money for Bain Capital.\" Mitt's fortune multiplied throughout the late 1990s even as he decided not to run against John Kerry and attended the bare minimum of state GOP functions. He remained, according to one close aide to then governor Paul Cellucci, \"well regarded, and people hoped that he would be a future candidate. But he also had access to money; he had a whole different Rolodex from the usual political crowd.\"\n\n Mitt's civic call to duty came in February 1999, when he agreed to relocate to Salt Lake City and head the scandal-ridden Olympic Winter Games. Upon being approved by a voice vote of Olympic trustees, he joked, \"Where were you when I needed you? I wish I had a few of these voters in 1994!\"\n\n At the same time, his charmed personal life had taken some tragic turns. George Romney had died in 1995 at the age of 88\u2014fittingly, while ercising on his treadmill. (Three years later, in The Boston Globe, Mitt published a deeply heartfelt ode to George on Father's Day.) In 1998, his mother died as well. That same year, Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. His jovial-capitalist mien now tempered by the whiff of mortality, Romney declared, \"I don't want to spend the rest of my life earning more money.\"\n\n While turning around the Olympics, from 1999 through 2001, Mitt made no secret that, as he said to a reporter, \"there is no question that I would seriously consider running for office again.\" He now widened his prospects to both the Senate and the governorship\u2014in either Massachusetts or Utah. As a Romney aide would later tell me, \"Yeah, he wanted to be governor. Whether it was governor of Massachusetts or Utah or Oklahoma, he didn't much care. It was about winnability. He was a practical guy, and he didn't want to lose twice.\" Ever the pragmatist, Romney was also concerned about the timing. \"He was an ideal candidate,\" says Scott Simpson, then the ecutive director of Utah's Republican Party. \"But the message he gave us was that he was all about the Olympic Games and he wasn't going to get involved in partisan politics.\"\n\n That began to change at the beginning of 2002, when Massachusetts Republican governor Jane Swift's election chances grew bleak in the wake of several statehouse scandals. Two local Republican activists, Jon Spampinato and Denise Jillson, began a draft-Mitt movement among GOP state delegates. Apprised of this, Mitt from Utah called Spampinato one morning and by way of greeting said, \"You're my hero.\" He added that he would give the matter some thought. When Spampinato e-mailed later that he and Jillson had locked up sufficient delegates for Romney to qualify for a primary runoff, the Olympics boss wrote back, \"That's great!\"\n\n In late February, a team of four Massachusetts Republicans, led by Neil Chayet, arrived in Salt Lake City. France's ice-skating team was just leaving Mitt's office as Chayet's group entered. Getting right to the point, Chayet said, \"Mitt, how about you running for governor?\"\n\n Mitt's face lit up. \"Well, let's talk about that,\" he said. For the next hour, they discussed the prospects. Less than a month later, Mitt Romney returned home to Belmont, Massachusetts, and seeing that she could not match the popular and well-funded Olympic savior, Jane Swift reluctantly stepped aside.\n\n\n\n Romney's right-hand man during the gubernatorial race was Bob White, his partner at Bain Capital. White immediately set to work implementing Mitt's more businesslike vision of a campaign. He snatched up a few staffers from the political ranks, but at least as many were from the corporate world. Two Bainies, Eric Kriss and Kelt Kindick, ran the policy shop, while another, Brian Shortsleeve, served as deputy campaign manager. A BYU classmate of Mitt's son Tagg, Alex Dunn, became deputy political director. The one hire with experience in both worlds, the linchpin of the group, was campaign manager Ben Coes, who had been a speechwriter in the first Bush administration before joining a private-equity firm. Coes, a staffer told me, \"was bilingual, the translator. We'd say to Ben, 'Here's how we need to structure Mitt's day.' And Ben would say, 'Yeah, but we need like three or four spreadsheets and a deliverables checklist, and we need to put it all in a PowerPoint presentation so Bob and Mitt will understand it.' And that would enable Mitt to sign off on it.\"\n\n Mitt's corporate-minded senior staff eschewed the typical campaign playbook. \"We used a lot of techniques that had to do with what credit card companies do\u2014identifying customer demographics, determining their interests and what they believe in,\" recalls one senior staffer.\n\n They also incorporated another element of \"the Bain Way\": cramming as many points of view as could fit in a room. Applied to a political campaign, which normally relies on one or two masterminds, such discursiveness could prove unwieldy. One ally recalls contacting a midlevel aide and offering some strategic advice. \"I'll take the message in\u2014we're just about to have a big meeting,\" the aide told him. \"Who's he in there with?\" the ally asked. \"There's a lot of Bain people,\" she said.\n\n Yet even with all the Bain models and Bain personnel, Romney still felt uneasy about his chances. \"His confidence was still shaken by what happened in 1994,\" a senior aide recalls. \"As a candidate who could take a script and give a performance to a camera or at a press conference, he was a thoroughbred.... But behind the scenes, he always had a lot of doubts. The primary deciding factor for Mitt was, would it work? Sometimes it was just the petty issue of the day. 'You're going to get asked about this, Mitt, so what do you think?' He'd say, 'Well, I don't know. What do you think I should say? What do our polls say?' On issues he didn't have strong feelings about\u2014and by and large he didn't have strong opinions about most issues\u2014he was willing to be wherever he needed to be to put the campaign in a position to win.\"\n\n What particularly worried Mitt, according to another top aide, was that his opponent, state treasurer Shannon O'Brien, would use his Bain past against him as Ted Kennedy had: \"Mitt was extremely concerned to the point of being pretty upset that they were going to do to him what they'd done to him in '94. But [top strategist Mike] Murphy sat in Mitt's kitchen and told him, 'Look, they're not electing a senator this time. They're not looking for someone they like. They're electing a boss.' \" Murphy predicted\u2014accurately, as it would develop\u2014that the visuals of laid-off workers might actually intrigue voters who craved a reformer unafraid of rolling a few heads.\n\n Camera-ready though he was, the CEO still saw the campaign through rational, data-driven eyes rather than Clintonesque instincts. An aide recalls driving with the candidate to meet a group of mayors and hearing Mitt say, \"I just don't understand why I'm meeting with these people. Tell me if I'm wrong, but I'm their worst nightmare: I'm Mitt Romney, a Republican running for governor. I'm the last thing these mayors want.\"\n\n \"I was dumbfounded\u2014he was so antsy,\" recalls the aide. \"He just wasn't a backslapper, and you had to tell him what to say.\"\n\n As a corporate-turnaround specialist, Mitt had learned how to be a practitioner of \"creative destruction\"\u2014how to downsize, send in an army of lawyers, and demolish whatever stood in the way of maximum shareholder value. But as a high-level strategist, Mitt's hands remained clean throughout. He had not yet developed the stomach for hand-to-hand political combat\u2014particularly when the adversary was a woman, as was the case in 2002 with Democratic nominee O'Brien. That fall, the Boston Herald ran a cartoon depicting the two candidates squaring off, about to brawl\u2014with O'Brien's arm bulging in the manner of Popeye, while Mitt looked like a stick figure. That damning image, recalls a top adviser, \"had a dramatic impact. He really started going after her.\"\n\n Still, by the fall, Romney was once again behind his opponent by double digits. He confronted his chief strategist, Murphy\u2014who, some feared, had been spreading himself too thin by also handling Florida governor Jeb Bush's reelection campaign. \"Mike, this is really important,\" the candidate said. \"This is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I can't do anything if I don't win this one.\"\n\n Murphy responded with an eye-catching but devastating ad comparing O'Brien with a worn-out basset hound. It helped propel Romney to the governorship. And at what point after Mitt Romney's victory did it become apparent that the governor-elect had his eye on an even higher office? \"About a minute or two after the returns came in,\" one adviser recalls. \"Remember, with these private-equity guys, it's all about options: 'If we keep our options open, one of them's going to come back as a home run.' Running for president or being picked as vice president immediately became two of those options.\"\n\n\n\n Romney's presidential preparations began almost immediately. In July of 2003\u2014six months into his governorship\u2014a small team of advisers began to discuss forming a political-action committee so that Mitt could begin testing the presidential waters, distributing money and ingratiating himself with key figures in the early-primary states. They eventually formed the Commonwealth Political Action Committee, which consisted of a federal PAC and four state PACs, each set up to operate in what was believed at the time to be early-primary states for 2008: Iowa, South Carolina, Michigan, and Arizona. A PAC for neighboring New Hampshire was rejected so as to \"tamp down expectations that he was actually contemplating a presidential run and so as to not hurt his agenda in Massachusetts,\" according to one participant in these discussions. \"We did that structure because in the federal PAC you can only give so much, while in [some] state PACs people could give unlimited amounts of money. It was a very small group of people who funded the initial PAC. Most of it was Bain money. Some of the Bain guys were writing $30,000 checks. Everything was intentionally under the radar.\"\n\n Mitt himself approved the formation of the Commonwealth PAC in the summer of 2004, months before he received the Bennett memo. That July, a GOP operative in Des Moines\u2014who would later become Mitt's top Iowa strategist for the 2012 caucus\u2014began distributing checks to local kingmakers. On October 16, Mitt traveled to Des Moines for a GOP fundraiser. When a reporter asked him about his own presidential aspirations, he dismissively but ambiguously replied, \"I see myself as governor of Massachusetts.... We've got a good bench. The bullpen\u2014pick whatever sports metaphor you want\u2014is full.\"\n\n A month later, a Spartanburg, South Carolina, Republican official named Rick Beltram was surprised to find in his mail a check for $1,000 from something named the Commonwealth PAC. He called the PAC director, Trent Wisecup, and asked, \"Why'd you send us that?\"\n\n \"We just want to help your local activities,\" Wisecup replied.\n\n \"Well,\" chuckled Beltram, \"let me put words in your mouth: Governor Romney is probably gonna run for president in 2008, and he wants some name recognition down here.\"\n\n Beltram recalled to me that Wisecup \"hemmed and hawed, but he didn't deny it.\" Beltram, the Spartanburg County GOP chairman, suggested that Governor Romney deliver the keynote speech at their Presidents' Day banquet the following February.\n\n On February 21, 2005, Mitt Romney came to Spartanburg. His speech was filmed by a C-SPAN crew that was producing a series called Road to the White House. Two things in particular from that event would stand out to Beltram seven years later. First, the PAC performed with corporate high efficiency: \"Hardly a day went by in the six weeks before the dinner,\" he says, \"that they weren't monitoring what we were up to. They even had an advance team come down a week before and go over every detail\u2014how we assigned tables, how we'd have the back drapes, how we'd do the invitations.\" Even more impressive to Beltram was the governor himself: \"He gave a great speech, working from a well-prepared text. He had certain qualities we hadn't seen before in terms of his business acumen and success. He talked about the success of Staples and Domino's and other household names that he'd had a hand in.\"\n\n Mitt did something else memorable that evening: The Massachusetts moderate slung the red meat like an Ivy League incarnation of Jesse Helms. \"Being a Republican in Massachusetts is a bit like being a cattle rancher at a vegetarian convention,\" he told the crowd of nearly 400. Mitt emphasized his pro-life beliefs and his deep opposition to gay marriage. South Carolina Republicans walked away pleasantly surprised. Back home, many of Romney's long-time supporters were surprised as well.\n\n After all, back in his 1994 Senate campaign, Mitt had met with the state chapter of Log Cabin Republicans, a group representing gay and lesbian voters. \"When he talked about an inclusive Republican Party, he was very sincere and convincing,\" recalls Abner Mason, who was the Massachusetts LCR's president at the time. Mason asked the candidate to put in writing his commitment to gay rights (minus gay marriage, which wasn't in play back then). Mitt did so, and the Log Cabin Republicans officially endorsed him\u2014believing, Mason told me, \"that if he had won, he would've been an enormous force for change.\"\n\n Ten years later, Romney was reluctantly on the front lines of the gay-marriage debate. As governor of Massachusetts, he proposed a compromise that banned gay marriage but permitted civil unions. \"My sense,\" Mason told me, \"is that here you have a progressive Republican who's committed to equality, but he was forced to take a position that made some think that he is somehow antigay, which is totally untrue.\" Mason argues that Mitt showed his true colors in a New Hampshire primary debate, when he reminded voters that as governor he had appointed a gay man to his cabinet and that \"if people are looking for someone who will discriminate against gays...they won't find that in me.\"\n\n \"In my mind,\" says Mason, \"he's in the same place as the Clintons and Obama.\" Then Mason added unprompted, \"I am glad Romney's current campaign better reflects the real Romney. They should have run on his business record then, as they are doing now.\"\n\n\n\n Fortenyears running, Mitt Romney has been nothing more and nothing less than a professional politician. He attends fundraisers, delivers speeches, studies polls, sits in on marathon policy sessions, shakes hands, denounces the president, and makes promises, all to advance his second career. Still, watching Mitt, the dazzlingly successful CEO, gamely succumb to the rituals of his chosen second vocation is at times like watching Michael Jordan chase a curveball. Politics is an industry overstuffed with pseudoscientists, but its master practitioners are instinctual. By all available evidence, the Bain Way remains the Mitt Romney way. As a former senior adviser told me, \"The gold standard for him is the decision that's made with a complete set of data.\" And it's worked for him, so far.\n\n How it would work for America is another matter. An admiring member of Governor Romney's cabinet said to me, \"The interesting question is: If your ambitions for the presidency pull you away from the moderate middle, what happens when you're elected and you don't have to worry about that ambition anymore? I want to believe the answer is that he'll become that pragmatist again and move back to the center.\"\n\n Many such Mitt supporters maintain that he is at heart a Realpolitik businessman, just like his father\u2014which also helps explain why neither Romney has ever been a beloved member of their chosen party. The legendary Detroit Free Press columnist Judd Arnett once described George Romney as \"a populist-radical-progressive-conservative-liberal,\" who was widely viewed within the GOP as self-righteous and quick to remind others of his superiority. And of course a generation later, Republicans have yet to warm to Mitt. Neither man was a dyed-in-the-wool party animal. Arnett could also have been referring to Mitt when he wrote of George in 1969, \"He went to the Republicans because that was where he had the majority of his contacts, but he never felt wholly comfortable with them, nor they with him.\"\n\n In the end, the elder Romney grew uncomfortable with the whole process, especially the notion that government\u2014or business\u2014could heal social ills. \"One of the principal mistakes we make,\" George wrote during his final weeks at HUD, \"is that we are trying to solve problems that are fundamentally spiritual, moral, and social with money. It just can't be done.\" He spent his last years crusading for volunteerism, leaving politics for the next generation.\n\n No doubt his son approved. After winning his first\u2014and thus far only\u2014political campaign in 2002, and thereby completing his full transition to the public sector, governor-elect Mitt Romney asked many of his campaign aides to serve in his administration. At least one aide demurred, indicating a lack of interest in state government.\n\n \"That's great to hear,\" said Romney. \"No one should make their career in politics.\"\n\n Robert Draper is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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