It was about eleven years ago when an acquaintance phoned to
share his impression of a debate between Mitt Romney and Ted
Kennedy, then locked in a tight Senate race. His verdict: “Romney
was good, but I think he might be more conservative than he let on.
He seemed to be holding back.”
There’s a complicated dance Republicans must do to be
competitive in Massachusetts. They run to the right on issues where
the swelling ranks of independent voters are distrustful of
Democrats: taxes, crime, capital punishment and welfare. But they
must never vex the editorialists at the Boston Globe by
violating the most sacred liberal taboos, especially the
prohibition against nonliberal stands on abortion and other causes
of interest to values voters.
For most of his intermittent political career and especially
during his tenure as Bay State governor, Romney has observed these
conventions. He is pro-choice and, aside from the marriage debate,
generally in agreement with gay-rights advocates. Yet there
persists the sense that he’s been holding back. Romney’s recent
stem-cell maneuver has social conservatives nationwide hoping these
suspicions prove well founded.
In an interview with the New York Times, Romney came
out against research being planned at the Harvard Stem Cell
Institute that would involve therapeutic cloning. While Democratic
Massachusetts Senate President Robert Travaglini was introducing
legislation to promote embryonic stem-cell research, the governor
was proposing a ban, enforced through criminal and civil penalties,
on creating human embryos for research purposes.
Although Romney’s position on embryonic stem-cell research is
actually to the left of President Bush’s — he favors research on
embryos obtained from in-vitro fertilization clinics provided that
parents give their written permission, receive no financial
compensation and are told of other options that won’t result in the
embryos’ deliberate destruction — he won praise from many pro-life
conservatives. Kathryn Jean Lopez applauded
the governor’s stand in National Review Online, while
acknowledging it was a “non-ideal (from the pro-life vantage point)
but pragmatic compromise.” Writing in his syndicated column, Cal
Thomas commended Romney for standing “on principle” and putting
“more noble things ahead of self-interest.” Mitt also won favorable
press from Laura Ingraham and the web edition
of Weekly Standard.
MORE CYNICAL OBSERVERS SUSPECT Romney has his eyes on 2008. If he
were to run for president, he would obviously need to appeal to
Republican primary voters well to the right of the Massachusetts
electorate. “In long years of taking stands tailored to their
state, Democrats Mike Dukakis and John Kerry clearly hurt their
national chances,” opined the Globe’s Scott Lehigh.
“Comfortable locally, Bill Weld’s social liberalism rendered him
persona non grata with a wide swath of the national Republican
Party.”
Why else would Romney suddenly decide to stake out this
controversial position now, when it is not likely to help him win
re-election in 2006? He even faces more difficult terrain in the
state legislature, since pro-life Thomas Finneran has retired and
been replaced as house speaker by pro-choice Salvatore DiMasi.
In fact, Romney has always had a complicated relationship with
pro-lifers. His run against Kennedy in 1994, his first candidacy
for public office, was characterized by debate and confusion over
his stand on abortion. He accepted an endorsement from
Massachusetts Citizens for Life while vying for the Republican
nomination. But he declared himself to have been pro-choice even
before Roe v. Wade, having joined his mother in support of
legal abortion during her failed 1970 Senate bid from Michigan.
Romney retained the Massachusetts Citizens for Life endorsement
because he supported parental-consent laws, opposed taxpayer-funded
abortion or mandatory abortion coverage under a national health
insurance plan and was against the Freedom of Choice Act that would
have codified Roe (later in the campaign, he said might be
willing to support another version of the legislation).
NARAL’s Kate Michelman pronounced him a phony pro-choicer. “Mitt
Romney, stop pretending,” she demanded at a press conference. “We
need honesty in our public life, not your campaign of deception to
conceal your anti-choice views.” Janet Jeghelian, one of Romney’s
vanquished rivals for the GOP senatorial nomination, accused him of
“talking out both sides of his mouth” on abortion (she has since
become convinced of his pro-choice bona fides). Don Feder, on the
other hand, dismissed Romney in his Boston Herald column
for offering social conservatives “thin gruel.”
After his loss to Kennedy, there were reports that Romney might
transplant his political career to Utah, where he would run the
2002 Winter Olympics. In 2001, he declared in a letter to the
Salt Lake Tribune, “I do not wish to be labeled
pro-choice.” He went on to write, “Abortion is the wrong choice,
but under the law it is a choice people have.” Kem Gardner, a
personal friend, told the Tribune that Romney had to
exaggerate his liberalism on the abortion issue because he was
running in the Bay State: “To have any chance at all, he was
waffling.” (Gardner later told the Boston Globe that he
had erred, presuming to know Romney’s abortion views based on their
shared Mormon beliefs rather than anything the candidate had ever
told him.)
Predictably, all this came back to haunt Romney when he returned
to Massachusetts to run for governor. His Democratic gubernatorial
rival Shannon O’Brien characterized his abortion position as
“flip-flop-flip.” He fired back with characteristic nuance: “On a
personal basis, I don’t favor abortion. However, as governor of the
commonwealth, I will protect the right of a woman to choose under
the law of the country and the laws of the commonwealth.”
His campaign spokesman characterized this stance as “exactly the
same position as any other pro-choice politician.” Except, that is,
for some minor modifications. Romney came out against lowering the
age at which minors could obtain abortions without parental consent
to 16 (O’Brien took the opposite position) and for a ban on
partial-birth abortion.
SO IS ROMNEY’S STEM-CELL position just the latest in a series of
efforts to triangulate pro-life issues, this time with an eye on a
bigger prize than Massachusetts statewide office? It’s difficult to
avoid this conclusion, but there are some counterarguments.
When the centrist Mormon politician does take socially
conservative positions, whether on stem cells or gay marriage, he
does so with an eloquence lacking in many professional
Christian-right activists. His wife suffers from multiple sclerosis
— would the family man really want to play politics with research
with even a theoretical chance of helping her? Finally, his letter
to the Salt Lake Tribune and some of his other abortion
statements sound as much like someone trying to wrestle with the
issue as someone trying to weasel his way out of it.
As the 2008 GOP nomination contest approaches, many Americans
will be watching to see if Mitt Romney is another abortion waffler,
or if he has just been holding back all these years.
