By Business & Finance 
Patrick Freyne digs into the past and present of US presidential hopeful – the flip-flopping, dog-owning, Mormon ‘vulture capitalist’ that is Mitt Romney.
Romney’s main Irish connection, as far as we can tell, is that he made a dog called Seamus poo himself in terror. During his last bid for the Republican candidature in 2008, his rivals leapt on a family anecdote about how Romney once transported their dog in a dog-carrier on a roof rack. After the dog soiled itself and the back window of the car, Romney very calmly pulled in, hosed down both car and dog, and continued on in the same manner.
Romney has over the years responded to this allegation by stressing the safety of dog carriers and implying that roof-racks are a reasonable way to transport animals. For his enemies, this story is a symbol of Romney’s lack of empathy, to his supporters it’s a sign of pragmatic dog-poo management (It’s not just the dog’s name, incidentally, that makes me assume he was of the diaspora – he was an Irish Setter).
The anecdote demonstrates the Romney conundrum: he’s a cool-headed, dog-agnostic technocrat in a country that increasingly wants hot-headed dog-loving populists. In another era, Romney would be the perfect candidate. He’s a handsome family man with a good political track record and a hugely successful business career. He married his high-school girlfriend (Ann Davis), donates 10% of his money to his Mormon church and has a fortune of around $250mn. He is by far the best-funded candidate in the field.
Born William Mitt Romney in 1947 in Detroit Michigan, to the very wealthy George and Lenore Romney, he was the youngest of four children. His father George was president of American Motors and subsequently the Governor of Michigan. In kindergarten Romney underwent his first “flip-flop” when he decided he’d prefer to be called “Mitt” than the previously preferred “Billy”. As a child and teenager he idolised his father. He took a keen interest in the automobile industry and worked as an intern on his father’s gubernatorial campaigns. Personally conservative, he met his wife in his senior year of high school and they were engaged to be married before he graduated.
He spent a year in Stanford University where he remained generally unaffected by the rebellious spirit of the age (although he was reportedly involved in at least one counter-revolutionary demonstration against a sit-in). In 1966, like many young Mormons, he spend two and a half years in France as a missionary. He has occasionally alluded to this as a period of relative hardship (very relative, I should imagine) and as a time which awoke in him an appreciation of how amazing the US was.
In 1968 he returned to America and transferred to Brigham Young University to finish his undergraduate degree closer to his fiancée. In 1970, his mother launched a failed bid for a senatorial seat, and Romney helped on the campaign before graduating from Brigham and going to graduate school in Harvard.
At Harvard, he proved himself to be an ambitious young man, but not a particularly politicised one. “Mitt never struck me as an ideologue outside matters involving church and family,” Howard Brownstein, a classmate, recently told the New York Times. “He is a relativist, a pragmatist and a problem solver.”
Unlike George W Bush, who was also at the university at this time, Romney’s reaction to an overachieving father was not hedonistic escape. Married by now, and with young children, he plumped instead for defiant overachievement. He assembled his own personal study group of the best and the brightest (they still apparently reunite on a semi-regular basis). In response to his father’s wishes that he study law rather than business, he rebelled by studying both subjects simultaneously. He then continued his rebellious streak by choosing a career in the heady world of high finance rather than the motor-industry.
After graduation he joined the newly-formed private equity outfit, Bain & Company. By 1978 he was a vice-president. In 1984, he was elevated to head up its new venture capital arm, Bain Capital, and in 1989 he was responsible for successfully restructuring the whole organisation.
Rather weirdly, for a party that prides itself on having uncompromising attitudes to free-enterprise and capitalist creative destruction, Romney’s Bain Capital CV has caused controversy among Republicans. While Romney himself sees himself as a “job-creator” and points to companies that would never have launched without Bain’s intervention, others have picked on the company’s legacy of hostile take-overs and layoffs. He’s been called a “predatory capitalist” by Newt Gingrich, and a “vulture capitalist” by Rick Perry.
In the more optimistic and financially stable 1990s, Romney’s Bain experience was less of a liability. Romney’s first stab at elected office was a failed bid for the senate against Ted Kennedy in 1994 with a pitch that highlighted his business experience and focused on economic matters.
Even then he had problems getting his message across. “I’m not as well defined in people’s minds [as Kennedy],” he said at the time. “It’s harder for people to know my views.” Eventually the more popular and clearly defined Kennedy was returned to power and Romney returned to Bain.
In 1997, the family went into crisis when Ann Romney was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (she would be stricken with further health problems when diagnosed with treatable breast cancer in 2008). But Mitt Romney remerged into public life in 1999 as head of the organising committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games of 2002. His success at fundraising for and revamping that organisation propelled him into the role of Governor of Massachusetts in 2003. A competent, seemingly moderate governor who got the state’s wayward finances under control, his greatest achievement was the successful state-wide health insurance system that became the model for the Obamacare.
This leaves him in a tricky position. While Romneycare was once considered a Republican success, the American right hates Obamacare as a matter of faith. So Romney’s own attacks on Obama’s grand plan have left him open to accusations of hypocrisy and opportunism. “He’s the one person who deserves the most credit for the national plan we ended up with,” economist Jon Gruber, a consulting advisor on Obama, recently told the Daily Beast. “And yet he’s railing against it. Does the guy believe in anything?”
It’s not his only incoherent position. As the uncompromising Tea Party mentality has hardened, Romney has been taking more prohibitive positions on issues like gay marriage, abortion and embryonic stem-cell research than the more moderately right-wing positions he took in the past. While it’s difficult these days for any Republican candidate not to seem inconsistent and insincere in an attempt to satisfy an incoherent base Romney seems more vulnerable to the charge of flip-flopping than most.
His first bid for candidacy of 2008 was marked by such accusations. His current competitors have also been making a meal of it. Rick Perry said Romney would say “whatever [he] needs to say for whatever office [he’s] running for”. Rick Santorum accused him of having “no vision of what he wants to do for this country.”
Romney’s lack of clarity about what he stands for is compounded by a stilted manner and a tendency to make gaffes that highlight his privileged membership of the 1%. In attempting to make a $10,000 bet with Rick Perry during a televised debate, he aligned the very poor and very rich as constituencies that don’t need help in a television interview (receiving welfare, he implied, was akin to having millions in personal savings). Strangely for a nation that has elected few presidents who aren’t members of mainstream Christian denominations, Romney’s Mormonism hasn’t actually been much of an issue. A few pieces of trivia notwithstanding (Romney had his father-in-law baptised posthumously), his Mormonism has seemed far less negative for his campaign than his identity as a millionaire, vulture capitalist and flip-flopper.
Regarding the latter, it’s hard not to feel that Romney’s political drive comes not from any clear-cut ideology but a sense that he is of a class that’s destined to rule. Indeed, during one of the debates he said: “[My father] had good advice for me. He said, ‘Mitt, never get involved in politics if you have to win an election to pay a mortgage. If you find yourself in a position when you can serve, why, you ought to have a responsibility to do so if you think you can make a difference.’”
It’s this, his “aristocratic patrician master of the universe-ishness” (satirist Jon Stewart’s words), that make the Republican rank and file uneasy. Yes, Romney is a business-minded candidate with a good track record and a well-stocked war chest. Yes, he has a square jaw, a loving family and a strong faith. Yes, he probably knows how to drive policy . . . But it’s not clear where he wants to drive it, and many Americans fear that like poor Seamus, he might stick them on the roof-rack till he gets there.
