ONE OF THE MOST remarkable stories of the 2008 presidential campaign was the rise and fall of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in his bid for the Republican nomination. Romney carefully crafted a campaign strategy designed to rally the Republican base that had elected George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He sought to establish himself as the only contender with appeal to fiscal conservatives, “hawks” on defense and foreign policy, and social conservatives, who were generally thought to hold the balance of power in the Republican primaries. At the heart of Romney’s right-flanking maneuver was an acrobatic repositioning away from the self-styled “social moderate” who was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002. Romney morphed from a non-ideological pragmatist into a fire-breathing exponent of “family values” as a presidential candidate.
It was all for naught. Romney’s efforts to win over the religious Right with a strident opposition to GLBT equality backfired. His reversals from previous positions in support of gay rights—captured in many public statements he made as a Massachusetts politician—helped cement the perception that he was a flagrant “flip-flopper” who would say anything to get elected. In their postmortems on the Romney campaign, pundits from across the political spectrum agreed that he failed because he was seen to lack a core personal quality voters hungered for: authenticity. His character had come into question.
Romney’s withdrawal from the race on February 7, 2008 may have lasting significance for the shifting electoral fortunes of the gay and lesbian community. Gay-baiting didn’t yield the electoral dividends Romney had hoped for and expected. The failure of the ex-governor’s bid threw into doubt the Republican playbook of Bush and his henchman Karl Rove, which was centered on whipping up the enthusiastic support of the “base” of the Republican Party, namely the religious Right. The pandering didn’t work for a candidate whose convictions seemed to be infinitely flexible.
Through much of 2007, Romney was considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. His immense personal wealth enabled him to launch TV ads in Iowa and New Hampshire early in 2007, which gave him sizeable leads in the polls in those key springboard states. In the run-up to the watershed Florida primary on January 29, 2008, he spent eight million dollars more than the other GOP presidential contenders combined on political ads. Unlike his cash-strapped rivals, he had a campaign presence in virtually every state and seemed well-positioned to build on predicted early victories in Iowa and New Hampshire. Since no other GOP contender had the money to mount a serious campaign outside a few targeted states, Romney seemed to be the only Republican with a nationwide reach. His campaign was widely credited as the most capable and savvy in the GOP field.
But the perception that he was a soulless flip-flopper dogged Romney through 2007 and into 2008. In attempting to deflect such charges, Romney preferred to talk about his change of heart on abortion, as though that shift stood in isolation. He told of an epiphany at a November 2004 meeting with a stem cell researcher, when he supposedly came to realize how the availability of abortion had diminished respect for human life. But no single maneuver was as revolutionary as his suddenly ferocious opposition to what the religious Right calls the “homosexual agenda.”
Romney’s record in Massachusetts provided abundant evidence that he saw GLBT issues as a convenient way to market himself to diverse segments of the electorate. Romney was elected governor in 2002 as an outspoken supporter of gay and lesbian civil rights, promising to make benefits for same-sex domestic partners a “hallmark” of his administration. He did make a handful of openly gay and lesbian appointments early on in his administration. But a politically expedient shift to the right received major impetus when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in its 2003 Goodridge decision. Romney thrust himself forward as an outspoken opponent of same-sex marriage, advocating that bans be added to both the federal Constitution and the Massachusetts state Constitution. He disparaged gay and lesbian families as unsuitable for raising children and dusted off the “one man, one woman” sloganeering of Bush and the Republican Party in the 2004 election.
Less well known outside Massachusetts were the myriad other anti-gay positions and actions that Romney hoped would persuade the religious Right that he was their candidate, a task made all the more urgent by this group’s misgivings about his status as a Mormon. In 2003, he vetoed funding for Massachusetts’ hate crimes prevention program, citing budgetary constraints. He impounded funds that the previous governor, Republican Jane Swift, had set aside for an anti-bullying initiative statewide. Outreach and training assistance to law enforcement agencies, to communities affected by hate crimes, and to schools came to an abrupt halt as staff were laid off.
As Romney ramped up his campaign for president in the second half of his term as governor, his hostility to GLBT equality became more pronounced. He acted to fire several prominent gay men and lesbians from high-level positions in state government (including this author, an appellate tax commissioner until 2006). He clamped down on the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth after anti-gay activists objected to the annual Gay and Lesbian Youth Pride celebration in 2006. When the legislature acted to limit Romney’s control over the Youth Commission, Romney outright abolished the gubernatorial body established by former Governor William Weld (a Republican) in 1992. His 2002 campaign promise on domestic partnership benefits became a distant memory, as putting a stop to same-sex unions became the defining issue for him. In 2006, Romney cut every program in the state budget that directly benefited the GLBT community: projects addressing same-sex domestic violence, suicide prevention efforts for gay youth, AIDS prevention funding, and services targeting gay seniors. His vetoes were overridden by the Democratically controlled legislature, but he proceeded to impound the funds anyway (a move that was reversed by his Democratic successor, Governor Deval Patrick).
Romney denied that he had scuttled the pro-gay positions that helped get him elected governor in 2002, saying that he had consistently opposed same-sex marriage and discrimination against gays at the same time. This disingenuous posture was undermined by a letter he had written to the Log Cabin Republicans in his unsuccessful 1994 campaign against Senator Edward Kennedy, which resurfaced in The New York Times. At that time he had vowed to be a more effective fighter for gay and lesbian equality even than Kennedy. He told the gay Republicans that he looked forward to a time when the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy afflicting gays and lesbians in the military would end, and stood in solidarity with gays seeking inclusion in the Boy Scouts of America. He was fulsome in his expressions of support for Massachusetts’ pioneering gay and lesbian civil rights laws.
As a candidate for president, however, Romney voiced concern about the burden that GLBT-inclusive non-discrimination laws supposedly placed on small businesses, and he insisted that the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy should remain in place. He foreswore any criticism of the Boy Scouts’ exclusion of gays. There was no concealing the fact that Romney had thrown overboard the support for GLBT rights that had seemed useful when he was running for office in Massachusetts.
As the campaign wore on, the Romney team grew visibly irritated over the attention that his shift on GLBT rights was getting. As his campaign saw it, he was acting prudently to demonstrate that Mormons shared basic values with evangelical Christians, notwithstanding their profound theological differences. His relationships with the media deteriorated as he bristled when called on his shape-shifting political persona. What he saw as skillful niche marketing was presented as inauthentic pandering by liberal and conservative commentators alike.
Had Romney succeeded in winning the GOP nomination through an appeal to the religious Right, which was suspicious of his Mormonism but reassured by his homophobia, he might well have entrenched the divisive politics of Bush and Rove for a generation. His formula of combining textbook appeals to the various key Republican constituencies with a slick campaign and a cultivated image as a competent manager could have become future stock-in-trade for Republican consultants. Gay baiting would have become an enduring feature of Republican primary contests, a de rigueur element reprising Bush’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage in 2004.
Of course, Romney was not alone in changing his political stripes to appease the religious Right. Republican nominee John McCain, who lambasted the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance” in 2000, went to Falwell’s Liberty University to deliver the commencement address in 2006. Professor Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia told The Boston Globe that McCain was “obviously going down to kiss [Falwell’s] ring.” On the other hand, no one doubted the sincerity of candidate Mike Huckabee’s opposition to homosexuality. But he had little appeal outside his conservative religious base, and his campaign provides no promising template for future Republican presidential candidates.
The 2008 primary campaign raised questions about the supposedly pivotal role of the religious conservative vote in Republican politics. The fact that Romney’s Mormon religion undercut his appeal to fundamentalist voters suggests that they won’t embrace candidates who espouse their values unless they also share their theological convictions. By spurning Romney’s determined overtures and his made-to-order positions on social issues, the religious Right set the bar for its support so high that future “mainstream” candidates may wonder whether kowtowing to them makes political sense. We may have passed the point when the blessing of activists like James Dobson of Focus on the Family or Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council mattered in the eventual choice of a Republican nominee.
It would go too far to assume that playing the gay card has lost its appeal for Republicans with national political ambitions. McCain remains rock-ribbed in his opposition to civil rights guarantees and protection against hate crimes for GLBT people. The religious Right continues to call the shots on the policy positions of most Republican office-holders on homosexuality. But prospects have clearly dimmed for a campaign strategy like Romney’s, which sought to combine strident opposition to GLBT equality with mainstream appeal. Perhaps Romney’s experience will lessen the incentive to demagogue gay issues for political gain in the future, even by Republicans.
