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DEBATE
Romney shows his true colors
BY SETH GITELL

Here’s a question that came out of Tuesday night’s gubernatorial debate in Springfield: is Republican candidate Mitt Romney the ideological heir to his father, the moderate Republican and 1968 presidential hopeful George Romney? Or does he have more in common with another 1968 presidential candidate — the renegade, conservative third-party candidate George Wallace? On Tuesday, Romney sounded more like the former Alabama governor Wallace than like his father, the former governor of Michigan.

Romney took staunch conservative stands on both bilingual education and the Big Dig — sounding almost like a libertarian when it came to the question of the latter’s cost overruns — and seemed to relish his attack on " special interests. "

Here’s Romney on bilingual education (currently the subject of a state-ballot-question movement that was originated in California by millionaire Ron Unz): " I am absolutely committed to having the children in our schools be taught in English. I’m convinced that English is the door to opportunity in America. This is a matter of putting the children ahead of the lobbyists and the special interests. " Notice the implication that it is somehow all-powerful elites who are keeping students ensconced in Spanish. Later in the same discussion, Romney pulled out an inflammatory example certain to win fans on the talk-radio circuit: he mentioned a Jamaica Plain school where half the students are taught in Spanish. Romney happened to ask the school’s administrators how many of those students were born outside of the US, and learned the answer was only five. Somebody call the Unz Hotline about this outrage.

Interestingly, when asked the same question, Democratic candidate Treasurer Shannon O’Brien also gave an answer that reflected her ideology on the issue — a sort-of " mend it, don’t end it " approach that President Bill Clinton would have been proud of. O’Brien, like Governor Jane Swift, supports legislation backed by Representative Peter Larkin of Pittsfield and Senator Robert Antonioni of Leominster that would allow communities to experiment with how best to teach English and penalize educators who fail to do so. " Even the Bush administration does not support the Unz petition, " O’Brien said.

Regarding O’Brien’s marquee issue of having " blown the whistle " on Big Dig cost overruns, Romney’s remarks seemed to break new ground and hint at his displeasure with the project as a whole. Following O’Brien’s account of her role — she noted that while she wasn’t the only government leader to raise questions about Big Dig cost overruns, she was the one who forced the ultimate disclosure by failing to sign off on financing bonds — Romney appeared to take issue with the idea of funding the crucial transportation project at all. " I’m going to have to use Paul Harvey’s line, it’s time to hear the rest of the story, " said the Republican candidate, who then proceeded to juxtapose a list of Big Dig costs with points in O’Brien’s political career. " O’Brien went to the legislature when it [the Big Dig] was a $2.7 billion project, and then when she was on the Transportation Committee [and] it rose $1.1 billion, there was no whistle.... The budget kept rising and rising and rising. " Here Romney seemed to be questioning the very premises behind the Central Artery Project itself. The big difference, after all, between the cost overruns that O’Brien ferreted out and the prior price increases is that two Republican governors — William Weld, who endorsed Romney last week, and Paul Cellucci — along with former Big Dig chief James Kerasiotes, either kept the cost overruns hidden or engaged in willful blindness about their very existence. The only way O’Brien could have tried to stop the cost increases earlier in her career would have been by calling for the project’s demise — which was beyond her power as a legislator anyway. If that is Romney’s point — and by making it, he may merely have been playing to the anti–Big Dig sentiment that dominates Western Massachusetts — then he represents a far more dramatic shift away from stands taken by even the state’s recent Republican governors than anybody anticipated.

Yet if ending the Big Dig really is his position, it certainly will make things much more difficult for Romney if he is elected governor. One way he can work out his budget plans — which include rolling back the $1 billion in recent tax increases while simultaneously instituting new programs, such as screens to stop commuters from rubber-necking — is by obtaining more federal money; he boasted of having received $400 million to bail out the Olympics. Yet Romney bemoaned the decrease a decade ago in the funding the state receives from the federal government. O’Brien called Romney out on the lack of substance behind his fiscal plans: " You’re not going to be able to pay for those screens if we put your plan in place. Your plan will create a huge budget gap. "

With Arizona senator John McCain now pushing for a federal-rule change that would require Massachusetts to pay more — not less — of its money for the Big Dig, Romney’s assertion that he can get more federal money for the state seems less than credible. Given Romney’s stinging indictment of the cost overruns that have plagued the Big Dig almost from its inception, how can we expect him to convince McCain to give more money to the project? It defies credulity. Add to this the fact that McCain is coming to Massachusetts to campaign for Romney, and it becomes even less likely.

No, there were no knockout blows in Tuesday’s debate. But we did learn just a bit more about candidate Romney than we knew going in — namely, he’s got just a little of the firebrand Wallace in him.

Issue Date: September 26 - October 3, 2002
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