E-Mail This Article to a Friend Escape from Beacon Hill Mitt Romney, securer of the homeland? Also, pondering the perfect Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and the Massachusetts House of Representatives goes pro-choice. BY ADAM REILLY

EVEN BEFORE George W. Bush’s win last week, there was talk that Governor Mitt Romney might become our second homeland-security secretary. For Romney, it could be a welcome change: on Beacon Hill, he can’t even sustain a veto, but as homeland-security jefe he’d be America’s point man in the fight against domestic terrorism. Moreover, anyone who’s followed Romney’s career knows he loves drama. And as the successor to current secretary of homeland security Tom Ridge, he’d get plenty of it.

Now that a second Bush term is inevitable — and John Kerry’s Senate seat won’t be opening up — speculation that Romney may go to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has intensified. After the election, both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald suggested that Romney could be the next homeland-security secretary, with the Globe citing "some Massachusetts Republicans" and the Herald referencing a "Washington GOP source with close ties to Bush." But you don’t have to be an insider to wonder whether the governor might bolt the State House for DC. Romney’s résumé suggests a systematic, long-term effort to burnish his homeland-security credentials. He is one of the National Governors Association’s two "co-leads" on homeland security. He sits on the DHS’s Homeland Security Advisory Council, and chairs its State and Local Officials Senior Advisory Committee. And in March, Romney was elected chair of the DHS’s Homeland Security Funding Task Force.

True, pondering homeland security is part of any governor’s job. But Romney’s interest seems unusually keen — and not just because of his eyebrow-raising flurry of committee activity. Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership and the Olympic Games (Regnery, 2004), Romney’s 400-page song of himself, is also a reminder that he presided over the Salt Lake Olympics four months after the 9/11 attacks, amid fears of another major terrorist incident (see "Turnaround: A Reader’s Guide," News and Features, August 6). And when Romney introduced the state’s new high-tech driver’s licenses last month, he added an anti-terrorism twist. "The license to drive cannot be a license to steal," the governor declared. "And we cannot in any way aid or abet those who would falsify their identification for purposes of hiding in our society and potentially committing terror." A few days later, Romney visited a Northeastern University conference on domestic-terrorism preparedness and addressed law-enforcement bigwigs from around the country. In his speech, he complained that federal terrorism-related agencies have been sending mixed messages to state and local police and need to cooperate more effectively in the future.

Last Friday, three days after the presidential election, Romney’s homeland-security tour continued with a photo-op in New Bedford. If he does covet Ridge’s job, his timing was impeccable. In a cozy brick building on the New Bedford waterfront, flanked by a bevy of men in blue, Romney announced he’d approved funding plans submitted by Massachusetts’s five regional homeland-security councils (which Romney created earlier this year), and was allocating $45 million in federal funding. He also offered some thoughts of his own on homeland security, touching on the need to allocate funds intelligently and the transformed roles of police and firefighters. Afterward, public-safety secretary Ed Flynn stepped to the podium and lauded his boss. Massachusetts, Flynn said, is widely recognized as a "national leader for our strategic vision on homeland security." And credit goes to Romney: "I want to congratulate the governor for the strategic vision that he has — that recognizes that, without the strong participation of state government, homeland-security strategy for the nation cannot succeed."

A few hurdles would stand between Romney and the DHS post. Tom Ridge has hinted at retirement and been mentioned as a possible successor to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but nothing is official yet. If Ridge leaves, his job is sure to pique the interest of other prominent Republicans. With his September 11 credentials, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani — who’s also been identified as a potential Ashcroft successor — would be an obvious choice. (Ashcroft’s resignation was announced Tuesday; in a prepared statement, Giuliani seemed to indicate that he would remain at his consulting firm, Giuliani Partners.) But Bush and his advisers might balk at giving Ridge’s post to the charismatic and mercurial Giuliani, who’s already a front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2008 and who, in the event of a major terrorist attack, could easily steal the spotlight from the president. "The talk in Washington, DC, is that Rudy Giuliani would get that portfolio," says one Democratic consultant. "But my sense is, Bush wouldn’t want to make himself a lame duck any faster than he would be otherwise." Romney’s competition could also include 9/11 Commission chair Thomas Keane; Asa Hutchinson, Ridge’s undersecretary for border and transportation security; John Bolton, the hawkish undersecretary of state for arms control and international security; and Frances Townsend, homeland-security adviser to the White House.

There’s also the significant question of whether the homeland-security job would further Romney’s own ambitions. Everyone expects Romney to run for president in 2008. But when was the last time anyone was elected president from a cabinet post? Romney and his advisers may conclude he’d be better served by running for governor again in 2006, and campaigning for the presidency in earnest immediately after the election. On the other hand, Ridge is the only homeland-security secretary we’ve ever had — and since terrorism is the dominant political issue in 21st-century America, the job could prove to be a much better presidential springboard than any other cabinet post. (Given Romney’s messiah complex, the appeal of working at DHS might actually trump pragmatic considerations, and could even lead him to accept an undersecretary appointment. But being a cog in a machine after spending years as the Man in Charge might be a little too much "turnaround.")