ALL THIS NURTURES the secret Republican desire to put up another candidate against the Democrats this year. While some Republicans will give you a list of candidates they’d rather see run in Swift’s place — Card and Martin among them — Romney’s name is the one that makes their hearts flutter. The pro-Romney sentiment is such that one could easily imagine him four years from now making his gubernatorial bid at the age of 58 (his youthful appearance belies his age). A graduate of Brigham Young University, Harvard Business School, and Harvard Law School, Romney founded Bain Capital, a private holding and investment company, in 1984, with $35 million of his own money. The company is now worth $13 billion. In 1994, Romney gave Ted Kennedy the fight of his life. The moderate Republican led Kennedy by 43 to 42 percent as late as September. Eventually, a revitalized Kennedy beat back the challenge. Romney put at least $4 million of his own money into his campaign against Kennedy — a feat he could repeat in a governor’s race.
A comparison with Romney on fiscal grounds magnifies Swift’s failings. His great achievement in Salt Lake City has been restoring a sense of respectability to the 2002 Winter Olympics, which had been stained by the disclosure that members of the city’s original Olympic bidders gave more than $1 million in cash and gifts to the international committee in charge of selecting the site for the games. Romney also slashed expenses at the project’s bloated bureaucracy — which was $379 million in debt — in part by rejecting plans to provide volunteers with $1000 uniforms and costly cuisine. He cut the budget by $200 million and found an additional $200 million in financing. "When you get into a turnaround you never realize how bad it is," Romney told CNNSI.com last year. "I thought this would largely be a public-relations issue here. I didn’t know how severe the financial crisis was."
Such experience looks considerably better than Swift’s own budget handling. While she gamely outfoxed her counterparts — Birmingham and House Speaker Tom Finneran — in the state legislature last November by calling for the restoration of cuts that the Democrats supported, her efforts to release a budget last week drew criticism. The news of Swift’s decision to cut $43 million from the Department of Public Health (necessitating slashing anti-smoking education and dental care for the poor) and $115 million from the state’s pension fund came out in dribs and drabs. As a result, she has been taking heat in the press for more than a week. The Herald had a field day on Thursday with Swift’s retaining 77 public-relations professionals — at a cost of $4.5 million — while making cuts in other areas (headline: BUDGET AX SPARES SWIFT’S PR STAFF). Plus, Swift bears the biggest budgetary liability of all: during the 2000 debate over lowering the income-tax rate, she and then-governor Paul Cellucci promised that the state could cut taxes without curbing services.
Swift took a page from Talk magazine’s Tina Brown in making September 11 a scapegoat for her failure. "I don’t think any of us anticipated the events that would so dramatically change the economic circumstances that we’re facing," Swift said at her budget press conference last week. And despite the outcry over the cutbacks, she vowed to continue to push for the rest of the tax cut no matter the consequences. There’s no evidence that Romney would act otherwise on the tax cut, but he doesn’t carry the baggage of having advocated it.
Swift’s actions look even worse when compared to those of other state governors. Take President Bush’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, as an example. When Governor Bush learned that Florida faced a $1.3 billion deficit, he decided to delay $128 million in sales-tax cuts. The governors of Michigan, New York, and Louisiana are considering following Bush’s lead in putting off tax reductions. But not Swift. That intransigence in the face of severe budget cuts may be feeding into the governor’s growing unpopularity.
WHATEVER THE UNDERCURRENT of anti-Swift feeling in Republican circles, it’s hard to see how that translates into political reality. The Republican primary is a mere eight months away, and any challenger to Swift would need the support of 15 percent of the delegates to the Republican convention. Even Republicans who have been on lukewarm terms with the governor say it’s just too late to bring in any new candidates, including Romney.
"I think people need to give her a chance and understand that she’s working hard," says Rappaport. "Do I agree with everything she does? No, but I don’t agree with my wife 100 percent of the time either." Rappaport, however, does have one warning for Swift: "They do need to listen to the people at the grassroots of the party."
State Senator Robert Hedlund of Weymouth, a Republican who signed a letter on Mihos’s behalf, acknowledges that he has heard some subdued sniping at Swift, but says she is the candidate Republicans will have to live with. "Sure, if we had our druthers, we’d like to bring Abraham Lincoln back from the dead and run him, but it’s not practical and it doesn’t make sense," says Hedlund. "In spite of everything that’s been happening lately, I think Jane Swift is going to be a very formidable candidate in November."
As for the Massachusetts Republican Party, the voice of the state’s grassroots, new chair Kerry Murphy Healey stands firmly behind Swift. "I know that Mitt is a popular figure, and I suspect he supports Jane’s candidacy," says Healey. "Obviously the contention over the lieutenant-governor race has created some tension among her supporters. However, it’s important to remember that both Rappaport and Guerriero are strongly behind Governor Swift."
Swift’s aides, meanwhile, say the sliding poll numbers are secondary to the tough work Swift must do as governor. "The governor has always said that her primary responsibility as governor is to do her job to the best of her ability," says Magazine. "Polls go up and polls go down. That’s the nature of the business."
While the Republican leadership is lined up behind Swift and everything looks like she’ll be the party’s nominee, the governor faces one more obstacle. For the past 12 years, the Republicans have escaped what during the 1980s seemed to be their pathetic fate. Political junkies remember a series of Republicans who looked like frontrunners going into elections, but whose campaigns imploded in a sea of bad publicity. Just four years before Weld’s election, two Republican wanna-bes — Royall Switzler and Gregory Hyatt — saw their political ambitions destroyed in a blaze of press disclosures. Switzler, it turned out, had trumped up his Vietnam War record, and Hyatt dropped out after naked romps around his office made the news. Four years before that, John Lakian withdrew his gubernatorial bid following revelations that he had falsely claimed to have attended Harvard and received a battlefield promotion for his combat role in Vietnam. So there’s nothing new about late developments in the Republican field in Massachusetts. Swift would do best to make her peace with the Republicans feuding around her. That would ensure that Romney stays in Utah — and away from the Bay State. The dark reality for Swift may be that things look bad for her, regardless of whether Romney runs now or, as is more likely, in four years.
Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com
