Facing hard realities, Romney accrued modest list of successes

Less than three years into the CEO-style governorship of Mitt Romney the broad reform agenda he promised in the early days has been reduced by the political reality of Beacon Hill to a more modest series of legislative accomplishments.

Horse-trading and patronage, long the currency of the State House, have been anathema to Romney. That reluctance to deal, combined with his uncompromising nature, has meant that many Romney proposals -- even bottom-line, money-saving moves -- were ignored, killed, or gutted by the Democrats who run the Legislature. Close courthouses? Not in our districts. Merge the Highway Department and Turnpike Authority? Forget it.

Even on reinstating the death penalty, a hot-button issue on which polls have indicated that Romney had popular support, the governor lost a vote in the House by nearly 2 to 1. Eight years earlier, a capital punishment bill failed on a tie vote.

''If you're a reformer who comes in with a private-sector approach and you stick with it, you'll run into a completely different view of reality in a political process that doesn't accommodate reform in the same way [most people] would think about it," said Christopher R. Anderson, president of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, whose 150 CEO members generally supported Romney.

''The CEO governor can't fire a legislator," Anderson said.

Only within the last few months, political figures in both parties said, did Romney begin showing sustained interest in the hard work of political compromise, working with lawmakers to extract legislation on a drunken driving bill, a capital gains tax rebate, and, he hopes, a compromise on healthcare legislation.

But Romney's strategy for the last three years often appeared directed ''outside the building," using the news media to talk past State House insiders and position himself against balky lawmakers. He often said that with the huge Democratic majorities, all he had was the bully pulpit.

''Romney uses the media better than anyone I've seen in my entire political career," said Senate minority leader Brian P. Lees, Republican of East Longmeadow, who was first elected in 1988. ''He's masterful at it."

Blessed with leading-man good looks, Romney has steadily honed his media skills since his uneven performance during his failed challenge of US Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 1994.

But his approach as governor has roots in his experiences running Bain Capital, a venture capital firm, and then his three-year stint as president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, which produced the winter Olympics of 2002. As governor, Romney is the face and voice of the administration. The public profile of his subordinates, even at the Cabinet level, is minimal.

That was the practice in Salt Lake City, where his Olympics media adviser, Steve Coltrin, schooled him in ''single voice messaging," Romney wrote in a book about his Olympics experience, titled ''Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games."

''Multiple voices and multiple messages were confusing, possibly contradictory, and led to a loss of credibility," Romney wrote, though he said he felt sheepish because ''it sure looked like I was taking all the credit for the work of the thousands of people who were really doing it."

Now, as governor, Romney is quite matter-of-fact about the operation of his administration, with its obvious political benefits.

Asked recently about the subordinate public role of Lieutenant Governor Kerry Healey and his other deputies, Romney said in an interview with the Globe: ''That goes with being number one on the ticket and winning the election. You know, every now and then I have members of my Cabinet say, 'You know, I'd like to take the lead on this.' It's like: 'No, you don't run for election. I was the guy that ran in the election, so I'm taking that.' "

The approach extends to the administration's control of information and major decision-making, all of which are highly centralized. Romney's private-sector background also manifests itself in his devotion to data as a management tool. Every month, the administration updates its ''benchmarks report" measuring productivity and accomplishments of each agency. A 3-inch-thick binder goes to department managers every month.

If Romney's aversion to deal-cutting has hobbled his legislative agenda, the purist CEO approach is welcomed within the vast bureaucracy of state government.

''There's never political pressure on anything," said one manager, who worked in prior administrations in an agency that routinely makes decisions with political ramifications.

The hands-off political attitude apparently extends to the appointment of judges by Romney. A Globe report last July found no partisan or philosophical pattern in Romney's judicial and clerk-magistrate nominations. Two-thirds were either Democrats or unenrolled voters who made political contributions to Democrats. Romney opposes marriage or civil unions for same-sex couples, but two of his 36 nominees were gay lawyers and advocates of rights for same-sex couples.

By contrast -- under William F. Weld and his Republican successors, Paul Cellucci and Jane Swift -- sponsorship from a favored politician, including powerful Democrats, could wire a candidacy. In 2001, for instance, House Speaker Thomas M. Finneran, a Democrat, was five for five in recommending judges, who were nominated by Cellucci and Swift and confirmed by the Governor's Council.

With Romney, such advocacy can be the kiss of death, according to a prominent politician who refrained from recommending a candidate for a judgeship because he feared it would hurt more than help.

Romney's nonpartisan judicial policies contrast sharply to his hard charge into legislative politics in 2004, which had disastrous consequences. Romney helped recruit candidates and raise funds to challenge dozens of Democrats. But Republicans lost three seats, and only a few races were even close.

In the aftermath, many irked Democrats were emboldened.

Contrast that to the approach of Weld, the former prosecutor who in 1990 broke a 16-year Democratic stranglehold on the governor's office by attacking the Legislature, zeroing in on Senate President William M. Bulger. Once in office, however, Weld not only became an accommodationist, but by 1994 he appeared on election day at Bulger's South Boston polling place to endorse him.

''I hope you'll vote for Bill Bulger; he's a good man," Weld declared, exasperating the GOP's meager band of stalwarts.

After last year's legislative rout, it became apparent, one Romney adviser said, that his prospects of legislative success would never improve. Soon he began taking steps toward a possible presidential candidacy in 2008.

By February, Romney not only was traveling out of state, he was ridiculing the liberal political culture back in the Bay State. Any pretense of being moderate on social issues vanished. He tacked to the right on abortion rights, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research. The likelihood of a reelection campaign became more remote with each passing day.

If never quite inevitable, a run for president has long seemed possible. Before he assumed public office for the first time at the age of 55, Romney had enjoyed unusual status in American politics: He was a national figure. Though soundly defeated in 1994, Romney was the first Republican to make a serious run against Senator Kennedy, a liberal icon whom conservatives across the country love to hate. Eight years later, Romney led the rescue mission to lift the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City out of scandal.

His surname has always been a calling card. The son of the late George W. Romney, a much-admired former Michigan governor, Mitt Romney idolized his father. When Romney was sworn in as governor of Massachusetts, he used one of his father's pens to sign the official state registry.

More than one elected official on Beacon Hill propounds the theory that Romney's interest in running for president in 2008 could be a way to redeem his dad's failed candidacy of 1968, abandoned in the fallout from his remark that he had been ''brainwashed" by generals about the Vietnam War.

Romney has said his father's experience led him to closely watch what he says in public. He has a public speaking credo, which he attributes to the late Sam Ervin, a colorful US senator from North Carolina: ''Don't try to be funny. Don't lie. And whatever you do, don't blurt out the truth."