The Long Run: Political Lessons, From a Mother’s Losing Run

The Bentley Historical Library|The Associated Press|Getty Images|Romney Family|ReutersThe Caucus | The Other Romney Parent: In style and temperament, Mitt Romney may have been influenced as much by his mother Lenore as his father George.

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — Mitt Romney was 22 when his father came to him and his siblings in search of political advice in December 1969. George Romney, the former Michigan governor, was mulling the electoral prospects of another Romney: his wife, Lenore.

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George and Lenore Romney, in an undated photograph with their children, from left, Mitt, G. Scott, Jane and Margo Lynn.

A onetime Hollywood starlet who quit acting to get married, Lenore Romney had few political credentials. But she had been a popular first lady, and her husband was tied up in Washington as President Richard M. Nixon’s new housing secretary. Top Michigan Republicans were wooing her to run for a United States Senate seat.

“The children laughed about it,” Elly Peterson, a Romney confidante and party strategist, later wrote in a private memoir. “Then Mitt, first, and gradually the others, began to change their minds. They finally decided she should go with it.”

Today Mitt Romney is a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, facing a tough primary battle here in the state where he grew up. His Michigan campaign brochures and commercials are studded with black-and-white images of him with his father, a businessman-turned-politician he once called “the real deal.”

But a look at the lesser-known Romney, Lenore, suggests that in style, temperament and outlook, Mitt Romney is very much his mother’s son.

A faithful Mormon and stay-at-home mother who eventually emerged as an advocate of women’s involvement in business and politics, Lenore Romney, who died at 89 in 1998, had a “steely will,” in the words of Phillip Maxwell, a childhood friend of Mitt’s. Her larger-than-life husband was blunt and candid, a fiery campaigner who burst into a room. Lenore was controlled and self-contained, traits that friends say they see in Mitt, her youngest child.

“George was very unlike Mitt — he was kind of a bull in the china shop, and he would speak his mind regardless,” said Mr. Maxwell, a classmate of Mitt Romney’s at the Cranbrook School, an elite private academy here. “Lenore was much more measured. Everyone is focusing on the father, but he is really much more like his mother in that he is much more private than his father was.”

Just two years after Mr. Romney learned the brutality of politics through his father’s failed 1968 presidential bid, he witnessed his mother’s bruising 1970 defeat. Then 23, and already married, he had taken a summer break from his studies at Brigham Young University to campaign for her, appearing on college campuses and county fairs — an experience that he later said “taught me how to get out and see people and listen to what people are saying.”

She was ill-equipped for the rigors of politics — “Lenore was no George as a political candidate,” says Bill Ballenger, the editor of a political newsletter here — and lost badly to a popular Democratic incumbent, Phil Hart, much as Mitt Romney would later lose his 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts to another entrenched Democrat, Edward M. Kennedy.

And though Lenore Romney expected a glide path to the Republican nomination on the strength of her family name, she faced a difficult primary challenge from her party’s right wing, just as her son faces in his race today.

“There’s been a lot of conversation about whether Mitt Romney can excite the Republican base, the Tea Party-type people,” said Sara Fitzgerald, whose biography of Elly Peterson recounts Lenore Romney’s uphill struggle as a candidate. “One of the things his mother went through was being sniped at by the conservative right wing of the Michigan Republican Party. People commented that she got more opposition from the conservatives than she got from Phil Hart.”

Mitt Romney declined to be interviewed for this article, as did other Romney relatives. On the campaign trail, if he mentions his mother, he casts her in a supporting role to his father. But while Lenore Romney was a traditionalist — she had little use for the “strident voices” of the women’s liberation movement, and believed “a wife is a vital part of a husband’s development” — she also had a strong message about the influential role women could play in business and government.

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Super PACs' Super Influence and Their Destruction of Our Political System

As we enter the homestretch to Tuesday’s Michigan primary, there is another, arguably more important duel taking place beyond the battle between Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum: the war between their super PACs.

Restore Our Future, the Romney-backing super PAC, has bought over $800,000 of television time in Michigan, covering local broadcasts with accusations of Santorum’s past as a Washington insider.  And while Romney has a massive fundraising advantage over Santorum, a super PAC backing Santorum, the Red, White and Blue Fund, has evened the playing field by buying almost $700,000 worth of television ads in Michigan.

This marks just the latest influx of massive super PAC spending throughout the Republican presidential primary, which has become the most dominant force in the Republican race.

Super PACs, which came from the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling last year, can legally raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, unions and trade associations.  They are permitted to spend that money on messages supporting the election or defeat of federal candidates. They cannot directly donate the money they raise to candidates and are not allowed to work directly with the candidate’s campaign.

Super PACs are responsible for a new flood of secret and unlimited cash infiltrating our political system.  They have become far more important and influential than the candidates themselves or the voters, and have fundamentally changed American politics.

To date, there are 328 super PACs that have raised about $99 million and spent about $48 million in the 2012 election cycle, $42.5 million of which has been spent on the presidential race.  This amount of money is almost double the amount of money that came from outside spending at this point in 2008, when $23.1 million had been spent, $12.9 million of which came from super PACs.

More specifically, 12 candidate-specific super PACs have spent more than $22 million on ads and other expenditures so far during the Republican presidential primary.

The influence that super PACs have had thus far cannot be underemphasized.  The pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, spent $4.5 million last fall attacking Gingrich once he rose in the polls.  The PAC helped Romney fend off a last-minute surge by Gingrich in Iowa.

Restore Our Future has gone on to spend a total of about $8 million on advertisements and other expenditures to help Romney's electoral prospects, which played a significant role in Romney’s decisive victory in Florida.  Although this is far more money than any other super PAC involved in the 2012 primary has spent, Gingrich and Santorum’s campaigns have been carried by super PACs as well.

Since Gingrich’s steep drop in Iowa, pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future has spent $4.2 million, much of which has been used to paint Romney as a “predatory corporate raider.”

Rick Santorum’s campaign had raised the least out of the current Republican candidates through 2011, just under $2.2 million, giving Romney a 28-1 fundraising advantage.  But the pro-Santorum super PAC, Red, White and Blue Fund, spent over $240,000 in the days leading up to the February 7th primaries in Minnesota, Colorado and Missouri, helping Santorum sweep all three races.

What is even more concerning than how much money the super PACs are spending is that most of that funding has come from a very small number of individuals and organizations.  This makes small contributions from large numbers of Americans largely irrelevant, and multiplies the influence that the wealthiest Americans have over our political system.

Indeed, super PACs raised about $181 million in the last two years, and about half has come from fewer than 200 wealthy people.  Further, 93% of the contributions raised by super PACs were $10,000 or more, with more than half of this money coming from just 37 people who each gave $500,000 or more.

Not surprisingly, the American people are very unhappy with the super PACs and their influence on our political system.  According to a survey from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research, 62% of voters oppose the Court’s Citizens United ruling.  And over three-quarters say they would like candidates to make campaign finance reform a “key” issue in 2012.

The GQRR also poll found the majority of voters across the aisle – Republicans, Democrats and independents – all agree with the following statement: “Given what I see in the presidential race, I am fed up with big donors and secret money that controls which candidate we hear about. It undermines democracy.”

And the latest New York Times/CBS poll found similar voter sentiment regarding outside spending. The poll found that two-thirds of respondents favor limiting ad spending by outside groups.

The detrimental impact and corruption of super PACs on the American political system cannot be understated.  Candidates no longer need to persuade future constituents to donate to their campaign because they believe in that candidate's leadership.  Instead, candidates focus on convincing a few extremely rich Americans that their interests will be attended to if the candidate wins.  Make no mistake – expectations of advantageous policy positions come along with multi-figure checks.

It is a shame that such a small number of our political leaders are willing to take a stand against such deceptive fundraising practices.  Such methods directly diminish the resiliency of our country’s political system.

Follow Doug on Twitter @DouglasESchoen

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Political Memo: Obama’s Tax Policy Targets Slice of His Base: The Affluent

You would not know it from Republican cries of class warfare swirling around Mr. Obama’s new budget, which reiterates his calls for higher taxes on individuals earning more than $200,000 and households earning more than $250,000. Conventional understanding of election-season populism assumes that the president will be looking to stick it to die-hard Republicans.

In fact, affluent Americans have represented a growing portion of the Democratic Party for a generation. Even though Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, for example, he trailed the Republican incumbent, Gerald Ford, 62 percent to 38 percent among voters in the highest income group (those earning more than $20,000, the equivalent of roughly $80,000 today) that were measured by people conducting exit polls.

By 2000, Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, trailed George W. Bush 54 percent to 43 percent among the highest income group (those earning more than $100,000). In winning the presidency four years ago, Mr. Obama defeated Senator John McCain by 52 percent to 46 percent among voters in the top income group, those earning more than $200,000.

The conservative author Charles Murray, in his new book “Coming Apart,” which is about the nation’s widening class divide, identifies “Super ZIP codes” that the “hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite” call home. Even as he proposed higher taxes on the wealthy in 2008, Mr. Obama beat Mr. McCain in 8 of the top 10 such ZIP codes — by a ratio of 2 to 1 in communities like Atherton, Calif., Gladwyne, Pa., and Chappaqua, N.Y.

Mr. Obama also continued the Democrats’ progress among the much larger group of upper-middle-class voters. In counties with above-average incomes that the research organization Patchwork Nation calls Monied ’Burbs, Mr. Obama received 55 percent of the vote, up from the 49 percent President Bill Clinton received in 1996, the 43 percent that the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis received in 1988 and the 36 percent Mr. Carter received in 1980.

To make the point that he is not lashing out at opponents, Mr. Obama often notes that his proposals would raise his own taxes or those of allies like Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor. But the Democratic Party’s increasing electoral success in upper portions of the income scale points to something broader: an argument that people like him have a civic responsibility to bear more of the burden of deficit reduction and to pay for government spending priorities.

“It is the opposite of a pander,” said Dante Chinni, the director of Patchwork Nation. And it carries risks as well as potential rewards.

Some fallout appears evident in donations from Wall Street executives, who feel particularly aggrieved by Mr. Obama’s criticisms and policies. After besting Mr. McCain four years ago with donations from the securities, hedge-fund and banking sectors, the president has seen the former Bain Capital executive Mitt Romney amass far more cash from each of them, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

And in the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, Mr. Obama is supported by 43 percent and Mr. Romney by 47 percent of voters earning more than $100,000, even as he leads by six percentage points over all in a head-to-head matchup. In 2008, Mr. Obama split voters in the $100,000-plus category evenly with Mr. McCain. Yet Democratic strategists consider that fallout relatively modest and ascribe it more to frustration over gridlock in Washington than ire over potential tax increases. They see Mr. Obama as more vulnerable to defections among economically pinched working class voters than among higher earners whose taxes he would raise.

In large part that owes to the cultural influences that turned a large chunk of well-educated baby boomers toward the Democrats beginning in the 1960s. Those include support for activist government in areas like education, training and job creation, which Mr. Obama argues are necessary to spur growth and stem widening inequality of income and wealth.

“The types of affluent voters who have been going to vote for Democrats are unlikely to be driven away” by the prospect of higher taxes, said Geoff Garin, a pollster for Democratic candidates and for the “super PAC” backing Mr. Obama. “They have an appreciation for what those higher taxes pay for.”

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