Mitt Romney's Courage & His Party Of Cowards
A story of father and son, some differences and also some similarities
This may surprise some of you, but I’m something of a Mitt Romney obsessive.
I've been fascinated by him ever since he was governor of Massachusetts, where his health care plan brought nearly universal coverage to the state and became a model for the Affordable Care Act. (You can read a lot more about that in my book.)
Later, when Romney ran for president, I wrote a feature-length profile of him. I was already living in Michigan at the time, so I focused on his childhood here. I interviewed old friends and classmates, got a look at his yearbook from the Cranbrook School in the northern Detroit suburbs, and so on. That story focused a lot on Mitt's father, former Michigan governor George Romney, and the extent to which Mitt followed in his footsteps. Or at least tried.
To be clear, father and son were different in countless ways. Mitt always seemed to have more traditionally conservative views on policy, with more faith in business and the free market to solve problems. I couldn’t really put my finger on why until relatively recently, when I was reading Robert Putnam’s The Upswing.
To summarize and simplify a bit, Putnam and collaborator Shaylyn Romney Garrett (no relation to Mitt and George, as far as I know) argue that one of the defining factors in American politics is whether the focus is on collective or individual advancement — or more “we” than “I,” as Putnam and Garrett put it. The “we” view predominated in the U.S. for much of the 20th Century, and helped to produce the New Deal and Great Society. It was very much George’s mentality, as well. Afterwards, sentiments swung back in the other direction, away from a “we” mentality and more towards “I." Mitt is part of this trend. In fact, the book uses George and Mitt to illustrate the difference.
But in other ways, Mitt seems to resemble his father more clearly.
Everything I’ve ever heard or read about him suggests he genuinely sees public service as a calling — and that he believes this is such a thing as "good government," quite apart from partisan interest. And I think that goes a long way to explaining Romney's behavior over the last two years, as a Republican senator from Utah, while Donald Trump was president. Romney condemned Trump for his attacks on the rule of law and democracy repeatedly, clearly and loudly. And then, when the time came, he voted to remove Trump from office. Twice.
Those votes and that record are why, a little more than a week ago, the JFK Library and Museum announced they were giving Romney their annual "Profile in Courage" award. I think he deserves the honor. I also think it's a profound commentary on the state of the Republican Party today, because standing up for democracy and the rule of law shouldn't be remarkable things. They seem that way only because, inside the GOP, so few are willing to do it.
I decided to write about all of that — why Mitt Romney took a stand for principle, why the rest of his party didn’t and what it all means for American politics.
You can read the article here, at HuffPost:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/mitt-romney-profile-in-courage-republican_n_60665715c5b67785b777af69
You can order Robert Putnam’s The Upswing here:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Upswing/Robert-D-Putnam/9781982129149
And of course you can order my book, The Ten Year War, here:
https://read.macmillan.com/lp/ten-year-war/
Thanks for reading! More to come soon.