Romney masters the slip
As the well-scripted governor prepares to leave office, he is trading in the high media visibility of his early days for a much lower profile
For nearly four years, Governor Mitt Romney has dazzled and befuddled Massachusetts with his on-message, scripted style of governing that sought -- and won him -- innumerable headlines and television appearances.
But as Romney prepares to leave office, the once-visible governor has suddenly become much less so: He has entered a brush-past, sorry-got-to- run, talk-to-my-office stage.
Romney has, for the most part, successfully avoided the press in Boston and elsewhere in recent days, even as questions mount about his past comments on gay rights, his conservative credentials, and the timing of his expected announcement about his 2008 presidential run.
He granted an exclusive interview this week with the conservative magazine National Review, but has carefully choreographed the waning days of his Beacon Hill tenure to spend very little time there and even less time fielding questions from the news media.
Consider Wednesday's annual Christmas tree and menorah lighting ceremony at the State House, Romney's only public appearance in Massachusetts since Thanksgiving. On his way to the ceremony, the governor breezed past reporters waiting outside his office. "Merry Christmas, guys," he said with a smile.
Outside, once the tree and menorah were glowing, the carols sung, and the revelry over, Romney avoided reporters again by taking a different route off the second-floor steps.
And so it's been over the past couple weeks.
At a Republican event in downtown San Diego Monday night, an Associated Press reporter tried to approach him with a question. "Thanks, I have other people to talk to right now," Romney said.
The week before, Romney was in Asia. Organizers of his trip initiallly discouraged coverage of his speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing, though a Globe correspondent was able to attend.
Before he was in Asia, Romney was down South, making stops in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Jackson, Miss., where he did talk to local media, and attending the annual Republican Governors Association conference in Miami. He led a Nov. 30 press conference with the governors at the conference resort, but asked that questions for individual governors be posed to them privately afterward. Immediately after the press conference, Romney slipped out of sight through a curtain behind the podium.
At another point that day, Romney dismissed a Globe reporter's question about how he squared his tough talk on illegal immigration with the fact that the company that landscaped his Belmont home had employed undocumented workers.
"Aw, geez," he said and walked off brusquely.
Even on a softball question the day before -- he was asked to comment on Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee dropping out of the 2008 presidential race -- Romney wouldn't talk.
"We'll have a statement on that," he said, and they did.
Romney aides did not respond to requests for comment. With reports surfacing yesterday that Romney was preparing for a Jan. 8 announcement on his 2008 plans, his office has not decided how to handle media requests for end-of-year interviews.
Conservative pundits and bloggers have been pushing Romney to address his comments about gay rights during his 1994 Senate race, in which he promised to be a more effective advocate for the gay and lesbian community than Senator Edward M. Kennedy, said gays needed more support from the GOP, and expressed opposition to a federal constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
"Certainly Romney is going to have to offer an explanation of how his thinking has changed over the years," wrote prominent commentator Ramesh Ponnuru. A contributor to The Right Angle, a blog of the conservative weekly Human Events, wrote a post this week called "Romney's Gray Gay Rights Stance" that said Romney has quite a few questions to answer.
"The governor, widely speculated to be a 2008 presidential contestant, appears unwilling at this point to dispel the gray cloud his comments over the years have stirred up surrounding an issue many conservatives see as clearly black and white," the blogger wrote.
The National Review interview, published yesterday, may help. Conducted by Kathryn Lopez, an editor at the magazine who admits a fondness for Romney, the interview delved into the controversy over his 1994 remarks, which Romney blamed on political opponents. He explained his past statements this way: "Like the vast majority of Americans, I've opposed same-sex marriage, but I've also opposed unjust discrimination against anyone, for racial or religious reasons, or for sexual preference. Americans are a tolerant, generous, and kind people. We all oppose bigotry and disparagement."
Romney aides e-mailed excerpts from the interview hours after it was published.
The stakes are so high for Romney because he is widely viewed as a top-tier candidate for the Republican nomination and he has staked his reputation on being a conservative voice in 2008.
Alan Wolfe, a professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, said that Romney's past comments on gay rights could be a problem and that he needs to address them head-on.
"We're talking about Republican primaries here, where this is a hot-button issue," Wolfe said. "He can't dodge it. . . . Romney is really trying to walk a fine line, and he's getting into a lot of trouble."
Even though he isn't exactly engaging much with it these days, Romney has been professing respect for a free press and for the liberty of ideas afforded in the United States. Before lighting the State House Christmas tree on Wednesday, he told the crowd about his trip last week to the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea, and how it underscored the importance of freedom, democracy, and the right to choose. "All of these things come together in this great democratic nation," he said.
In his National Review interview, Romney said he gets nearly all his news online.
"No longer can just a few newspapers or television stations control what information we have access to," he says in the article. "The monopoly on news has been broken wide open. I trust the people and the power of ideas to triumph in the free and competitive information market that the new media provides."
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com. 