The comeback kid of 2008
What follows is an excerpt from one of the Betsy Bodman lecture series at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, given in the winter of 2020.
IT IS HARD for students today to imagine the electrifying effect on American politics that Mitt Romney's comeback had in the spring and summer of 2008.
Having remodeled himself from a moderate Republican into a hard-right conservative, it was a shock to find that the GOP favored the more moderate John McCain. Far from being daunted, however, Romney set himself on a new and daring course that political scientists are still studying.
It began when Mormon genealogists, the best in the world, discovered that Romney was actually related to Martin Luther King Jr. through Henry the VIII and his brief union with Anne of Cleves. This negated any necessity to have seen his father march with Dr. King, a statement that was proved to be false, because he was now family, albeit quite a few times removed.
His second brilliant move was to remove himself from the rolls of the National Rifle Association, saying that his antiabortion position now extended to animals, and that his hunting experience had, in fact, been very brief.
However, this position did not extend to the unborn anymore, and his famous speech saying that a woman's body was her own at the Americans for Roe v. Wade rally in St. Louis caught national attention, and brought tears to the eyes of abortion rights advocates across the country.
Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were startled when Romney began quoting their dissenting opinions, and he indicated, during a speech at the Yale Law School that spring, that he would like to see more justices of their ilk on the court.
He revealed his longstanding membership in Americans for Democratic Action, the Anti -Defamation League, and said he had belonged to MoveOn.org since the age of 16. Nitpickers pointed out that MoveOn.org had not existed when Mitt was 16, but he side stepped that by saying that he had intended at the age of 16 to join MoveOn as soon as it was founded.
Word spread that he might have actually joined the Socialist Party in France when he was a missionary there. He proposed, and paid for, a statue of Margaret Marshall - then the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court who had ruled that gay marriages were legal - to be placed next to that of the Quaker martyr, Mary Dyer, in front of the Massachusetts State House.
His whirlwind trip to Baghdad that spring caught attention when he announced that the war was a humbug, which he had always opposed, and said that General David Petraeus had indeed "betrayed us."
His lightning trip to Alaska with Al Gore, where he embraced a stuffed polar bear and said that global warming was the greatest danger to national security, was noted in the national press and in Oslo, Norway.
His avocation of higher taxes and his soak-the-rich speech in New York was bolstered by his statistics on how much the Salt Lake City Olympics had actually cost the taxpayer, and how McCain had opposed the federal bailout.
But perhaps the boldest, and most effective move in that long ago spring, was his appearance with Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the Mexican border where he turned to the cameras and said: "Mr. Bush, tear down this fence!"
His secret approach to the Obama team suggesting he might run as Obama's running mate was not revealed until years later. It seems the Obama people felt that the country wasn't ready yet for a black candidate and a relative of Dr. King on the same ticket.
Mitt's heavy financial investment in Tajikistan mining interests, however, in partnership with Bill Clinton, helped when Hillary's campaign decided that her transformation from the lefty, who had resisted the party's shift to the center, into the military hawk ready to be commander in chief on day one, had been all too successful. They now felt they needed a left-winger to appeal to the base, and a male, to balance the ticket. Massachusetts was a problem, but Mitt obligingly moved to California.
Obama captured most of the primaries, you will remember, but the fix was always in with the super delegates. And who can forget Bill, Hillary, and Mitt holding hands on the stage in Denver, as the balloons came down, and the powerful political rallying cry: "Vote for One and Get Three."
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
