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United States The candidates: Mitt Romney Mr Smooth of Massachusetts Jul 5th 2007 | CHICAGO AND KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI From The Economist print edition He looks presidential. Getty Images YOU can't accuse Mitt Romney of skirting the tricky issues. Addressing the National Right to Life Convention in Kansas City on June 15th, he said: "I am humbled to be standing among the many who have toiled for the pro-life movement for so long, when I arrived at this place of principle only a few years ago." Of the main declared contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr Romney is the most socially conservative. Abortion, gay marriage, foetal stem-cell research--he's against them all. But in 2002, when he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he said that while he personally opposed abortion, he thought it should be a private choice. That helped him win in one of America's most liberal states. Now, as he faces Republican primary voters, he says he has changed his mind.
His explanation is that while he was governor he had to grapple with the issue of cloning human embryos. He spoke to scientists who said they created "racks and racks" of embryos to experiment on, and then destroyed them. He realised, he says, that "the harsh logic of an absolute right to abortion had cheapened the value of human life to the point that rational people saw a human embryo as nothing more than mere research material." So now he wants to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that created a constitutional right to an abortion. Pro-life Christians are receptive to the idea of conversion: Ronald Reagan did it, after all. Granted, it was not as ecstatic as the applause that greeted Sam Brownback, another presidential wannabe whose pro-life credentials are beyond question. Willard "Mitt" Romney is the most under-rated of candidates. As recently as February, barely half of Americans had heard of him. Political junkies know who he is, but often assume his bid for the White House is doomed because he is a Mormon. That is certainly a handicap: one-fifth of voters say they would not vote for one. But Mr Romney thinks that once they get to know him, they will change their minds. In national polls, he comes only fourth among candidates for the Republican nomination, after Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Fred Thompson, who is expected soon to announce his candidacy. He took in $21m in the first quarter, more than any other Republican.
article), but his personal fortune, estimated at between $190m and $250m, allows him to fund part of his campaign out of his own pocket. Most important, in the two early-voting states where he has been campaigning hard, he leads the Republican field: by around eight points in Iowa and seven in New Hampshire. His plan is to win these two and then ride the subsequent national publicity to the nomination. He co-founded Bain Capital, a firm that made returns of 100% a year while he was in charge by investing in start-ups or buying ill-managed firms and reviving them. His colleagues describe him as an excellent manager with a hunger for detail. For example, when deciding whether to invest in Staples, a discount stationery store, he ignored what small businesses told him they spent on stationery and asked instead to look at the receipts. He saw a gap in the market, Staples filled it and Mr Romney made a packet. His first stab at public service came when he was hired to salvage the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The games were in the red and roiled by allegations of bribery. Mr Romney stepped in, cut spending, boosted revenues and turned a $100m profit. That gave him a springboard from which to win the governorship of Massachusetts later that year. He cut spending, raised fees for such things as drivers' licences and gun licences and, with the help of a windfall in capital-gains taxes, turned the deficit into a $700m surplus by 2006. Perhaps his most striking achievement, however, was to make health insurance compulsory. His scheme, thrashed out with the Democrats who control the Massachusetts legislature, seeks to make health care universal but still largely private. All but the smallest employers are obliged to offer or contribute to their employees' health insurance. Individuals who still lack coverage are required to buy it. And Mr Romney has set up an exchange to make it easier to shop around for the right insurance policy. The scheme addresses one of America's prickliest problems. Too many people lack insurance, and those who have it, who mostly get it via their employers, are terrified of losing it if they lose their jobs. This heightens many Americans' sense of insecurity and stiffens opposition to globalisation. Whether Mr Romney's plan will work remains to be seen--it came into force only on July 1st. Sceptics note that although car insurance is also compulsory, many drivers refuse to buy it. Mr Romney is keen to see all 50 states experiment to find out what works, unlike the Democrats seeking the presidency, who mostly favour grand federal schemes. He is tall and handsome, and he answers questions crisply and intelligently. Unusually for a man who preaches family values, he practices them too. They have five sons, all of whom are married and three of whom were Eagle Scouts. In a field where nearly all the other candidates have complicated family lives, this is a big asset. First, to win over the Republican base by stressing that he is both socially and fiscally conservative: pro-market, pro-military, pro-family, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage and anti-tax. If he wins the nomination, he will presumably then make a play for the centre ground by stressing his competence, his ability to work with Democrats and the fact that his health reform actually happened, whereas Hillary Clinton's flopped. So far, his supporters seem more attracted to his track record than his platform. Frank Calabrese, a student who came to hear him speak in Chicago last month, says Mr Romney is "the most accomplished candidate"; adding that his success at everything he turns his hand to is "almost non-human". and reasons not to be Mr Romney is in some ways too good to be true. Voters are suckers for politicians with humanising flaws--think of Bill Clinton or George W Bush. His life story lacks the pleasing, anything-is-possible-in-America upward trajectory of say, Mr Obama's or John Edwards's. His father, George Romney, was a bigshot businessman, governor of Michigan and a serious presidential candidate in 1968. Cynics mock Mr Romney's family, too, for being so improbably wholesome. Tagg Romney, his eldest son, responds with gentle humour on the blog he shares with his four brothers: "Maybe one of us could jaywalk or drive 30 in a 25 zone." He recounts, for example, how he asked his wife, as the Salt Lake City games were about to begin: "Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine that we'd be here at the Olympics?" Mr Romney's second weakness is that his positions are too good to be true. Or rather, they have but recently come to fit almost perfectly with what a plurality of Republican primary voters believe. For example, when trying to unseat Ted Kennedy from the Senate in 1994, he said he would "provide more effective leadership" than Mr Kennedy in promoting "full equality" for gays. He said he personally opposed gay marriage, but thought the matter best left to the states. Now he says he wants a federal constitutional amendment banning it. The campaign has barely begun, and his rivals are already gleefully hammering his flip-flops. Sam Brownback's people pushed a flier calling his pro-life conversion "false" under your correspondent's door in Kansas City, and a man in a dolphin suit stood outside the hotel claiming to be "Flip Romney". Some things that Mormons believed until quite recently make many Americans uncomfortable. Blacks were barred from the Mormon priesthood until 1978. And although the Mormon church renounced polygamy in 1890, a few splinter groups still practise it. Amusingly though, Mr Romney is the most monogamous of the leading Republicans (see chart below). During a Republican debate last month, a presenter recalled that on...
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