E-Mail This Article to a Friend Here comes the son (continued)

George Romney paid for his heterodoxy. As the 1968 primaries approached, conservative Republican commentators weighed in against his candidacy, reminding the party faithful that he’d actually raised taxes and had stabbed Goldwater in the back. But the essence of George’s appeal lay in his willingness to speak his mind, whatever the subject and whomever he might alienate in the process — for example, he criticized the Republican Party’s domination by corporate interests, as well as the Democratic Party’s domination by organized labor. That’s not how Mitt operates. "This is all 20-20 hindsight, but put George Romney in that situation, and you would have gotten a much different kind of speech," says Walter De Vries of Mitt Romney’s RNC appearance. "He would have tweaked their noses; he would have said, ‘Here are the right things to do.’ Mitt Romney’s was just another politically correct speech. I’m not faulting him for that — at that convention, if you said anything different about anything, you would have gotten hooted off the floor. All I can tell you is, George Romney was one of a kind."

The senior Romney’s propensity for candor extended even to his Mormon faith. In a speech he delivered at Brigham Young University when he was still a businessman, George emphasized the centrality of a particular Mormon precept in his life: "My experiences ... have convinced me that the 24th verse of the 19th section of the doctrines and covenants of my church contains the Lord’s formula for success: ‘Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good, if ye walk uprightly and remember the covenant wherewith ye have covenanted one another.’ " When George announced his 1962 gubernatorial campaign, he said he’d reached his decision after praying and fasting for 24 hours. During the campaign, in an address at the International Christian Leadership Dinner, he suggested that his faith would guide his public life: "In the daily work we are called upon to do, we may on occasion fail God, but he never fails us. If trained to listen, all of us may receive power from Him — power which will help us in the conduct of our daily affairs and in the really important decisions that we must make in our business, governmental, or community affairs. This is no time for men to hide their religious views or to fail to express Christian principles."

Mitt Romney played defense on religion in 1994, when a Republican primary opponent and then Ted Kennedy each suggested that Mormon doctrines, like the Church of Latter-day Saints’ former exclusion of black men from the priesthood for bearing the "mark of Cain," were valid campaign issues. (The same issue had dogged George Romney. The priesthood restriction was lifted in 1978, but the Church of Latter-day Saints has never officially repudiated the "mark of Cain" doctrine.) The 1994 dust-up, which was handled in remarkably clumsy fashion by the Kennedy camp, actually may have worked in Romney’s favor: the Romney camp charged religious bias, and Romney himself invoked John F. Kennedy’s defense of his Catholicism during the 1960 presidential campaign.

Since then, Romney has rarely spoken of his faith. Maybe he worries that too much emphasis on his Mormonism could undercut his role as a spokesman for "traditional" marriage, since the "3000 years of recorded human history" Romney cites to prove marriage’s immutability can’t be squared with his great-grandfather’s polygamy. (According to George Romney: Mormon in Politics, a sympathetic biography by Clark R. Mollenhoff published in 1968 by Meredith Press, Mitt Romney’s great-grandfather Miles Park Romney was a "confirmed polygamist" with three wives.) But that’s another story. Suffice it to say that, where his Mormonism is concerned, Mitt Romney is — yet again — less forthcoming than his father was.

ROMNEY WOULDN’T be the first prominent politician to define himself in contrast to his father’s real or perceived missteps. Joe Kennedy was an isolationist and advocate of Nazi appeasement; John Kennedy founded the Peace Corps and took the nation to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. George H.W. Bush was a foreign-policy pragmatist who passed on deposing Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War; George W. Bush is a zealous idealist, and Hussein’s ouster — which he undertook against the urging of his father’s former advisers — looms as the defining event of his presidency.

From a careerist point of view, it’s probably wise for Mitt Romney to appropriate his father’s legacy selectively. As already noted, George’s willingness to take unpopular and risky positions alienated conservative Republicans. And the Michigan governor’s appealing candor eventually proved to be his undoing. George had initially backed the war in Vietnam, but later became a critic; after a 1967 trip to the country, he told an interviewer he’d been subjected to "brainwashing" by US military officials during his visit. The media promptly seized on this remark as proof that George was unfit to be commander in chief. "People say, ‘Basically, Romney was right — he had the US government selling him a bill of goods about how the war was going,’" says Bill Ballenger, editor of Inside Michigan Politics. "The problem is, you have to understand what the word ‘brainwashed’ meant at the time. This was about five years after The Manchurian Candidate came out, and a dozen or 15 years after there were Americans brainwashed by the Chinese in Korea. It was an infelicitous choice of words." The brainwashing comment proved to be George’s own version of the Howard Dean Scream. His poll numbers plummeted, and by the 1968 New Hampshire primary, he essentially had dropped out of the race. Little wonder that, in Turnaround, Mitt Romney warns against speaking to the press without a spin doctor present: "Having a pro there to hear what you say makes sure that if you miss something or get a fact wrong, they can clear it up, either on the spot or later. It avoids a bad story."

But while being doctrinaire, obedient, and guarded may help Romney climb the Republican ladder, it might not be good for the Massachusetts Republican Party — or for Massachusetts in general. Romney’s aggressive stumping for Bush threatens to limit the help he can give to this year’s much-touted Republican state-legislative slate. If Bush is re-elected, it’s a safe bet Romney will tack even further to the right, particularly if he remains governor and wants to show he’s a good team player (see "Schiz Romney," News and Features, May 14). This could exacerbate Romney’s already-strained relations with the legislature, and create a serious disconnect between the governor and the Massachusetts electorate. And that, in turn, could scuttle his goal of building up the state Republican Party. If nothing else, Romney’s divergence from his father’s example has already given us a governor who gets along poorly with Democrats, whose attention drifts routinely from his home state to Washington, DC, who speaks in sunny banalities, and who seems disinclined toward original thinking or genuine empathy.

The great irony is this: by steering clear of his father’s most appealing tendencies, Mitt Romney is positioning himself to achieve what his father couldn’t. George Romney’s presidential moment was supposed to come in 1968, six years after he was first elected governor. Mitt defeated Democrat Shannon O’Brien in 2002. You can do the math.

Adam Reilly can be reached at areilly[a]phx.com.