Exactly How ‘Moderate’ Was George Romney, Really?
George Romney was no moderate by today’s standards. He was a staunch fiscal conservative who explicitly denied that he was some kind of a moderate. While he famously embraced the civil rights movement and supported the occasional fiscally conservative Democrat like Paul Tsongas, George Romney took positions on social issues that would make him a rock-solid conservative today.
Yes, he did some things that would trouble today’s conservatives, but so did Ronald Reagan. Romney ran against Barry Goldwater for the Republican nomination in 1964 and didn’t endorse him during the general election campaign. Romney was Nixon’s HUD secretary, which means that he helped grow the federal bureaucracy. That experience, though, made him even more fiscally conservative because of the waste he saw in trying to solve problems with government money. Even before he became Michigan’s governor, he led the rewriting of the state’s constitution to mandate a balanced budget. Though Michigan’s economy has suffered for over a decade, the state government in Lansing never got nearly as underwater as states like California and New York are today.
Just as the press now portrays Mitt as embracing extremely conservative political positions, so too the GOP of the early 1960s now receives an offensive caricature. It’s effective in the current presidential campaign to portray George Romney as more “moderate” and less conservative than he really was so his son Mitt can be cast as the “etch-a-sketch” candidate pandering to his party’s right wing. Part of that involves rewriting history to darken the GOP with a stain of racism and extremism.
A trip down memory lane for us old farts.
And several poignant reminders.
Much of George Romney’s problem wasn’t with Goldwater personally, but the type of conservatives who carried him to victory. Bircherism was rampant on the right in those days, and Romney correctly viewed it as toxic to mainstream conservative ideals. And the Goldwater people conducted the convention with an iron hand, which had not been done in the GOP previously. This is more or less the norm these days, but then the silencing of opposing views was unheard of.
George Romney wasn’t a Goldwater conservative by any stretch of imagination, and there really weren’t any Reagan conservatives yet, but he was a mainstream conservative who hadn’t alienated the liberal wing of the party. In those days, both parties had liberals, conservatives, and moderates.
In the 1967-68 campaign, Romney was viewed as the “not Nixon” candidate. The party leadership resented Nixon, who they felt had blown 1960 and forfeited any goodwill by losing the CA gubernatorial race to Edmund Brown in 1962. Nixon went over their heads after the Goldwater debacle, traveling the country raising money for state and local parties and candidates and earning a lot of gratitude and chits in the process.
The truth was George Romney had virtually no chance to beat Nixon anyway. The grassroots had already decided. The “brainwashed” comment and the controversy after it gave the major donors an excuse to bail out, that’s all.
I lived in Michigan back then. I’ve since moved away, like almost everybody else.
In my view, George Romney was a hack and a flop. A lousy governor and a lousy HUD secretary. He worked tirelessly against the blue collar suburbs of southeastern Michigan, trying to make them carry the already collapsing city of Detroit.
But I’m impressed with his son as a candidate. Mitt Romney is a sincere, highly intelligent person and I look forward to voting for him.
“I’m a believer that no matter who you are or what office you’re running for, you should be as transparent as you can be with your tax returns and other aspects of your life so that so people have the appropriate ability to judge your background.”
Who said that?
Texas governor Rick Perry.
So why doesn’t Mr. Romney want people to have the “appropriate ability to judge his background”, I wonder.
There are two possible reasons:
1. Mr. Romney paid little or no taxes for many of the last twelve years; or
2. He took advantage of the 2009 amnesty to escape prosecution for criminal tax evasion.
As he pointedly refused to release anything prior to 2010, I strongly suspect it’s the latter reason that Mr. Romney doesn’t want us to have the “appropriate ability to judge his background.”
Much like Obama doesn’t want to release his college records nor passport application? I’d urge Romney to release his tax records just as soon as Obama’ documents are public.
To borrow your quote: “As he pointedly refused to release anything prior to 2010, I strongly suspect it’s the latter reason that Mr.[Romney]Obama doesn’t want us to have the “appropriate ability to judge his background.”
I’d like to be able to judge both.
asinine comment from an ignoramus.
Lessee, our consulate in Beghazi was just torched and the Ambassador murdered; we have the Fast and Furious mess; Congress has passed no budgets for more than 3 years; sequestration is going to irresponsibly cut our government, heavily affecting our military; we have $16T in national debt and are adding another $T+ each year; real inflation is through the roof ($4+/gal gas); home prices still stink, and foreclosures are very high; people are struggling to find work; 1/6 of America on food stamps and such; SS and Medicare are going broke…
…and you want to talk about squeaky-clean Romney’s tax returns of years past, after it has been proven that he owes no taxes, and has even overpaid a bit, as well as having given enormous sums to charity?
ARE YOU EFFING INSANE?!?
I see no reason for candidates to reveal 10 years worth of tax returns. Obama has revealed zilch about his life and what he has revealed is subject to question. He has admirtted making up composite characters in his life story. Who is to know what is true.
The ’64 Election is the first one I have much memory of; turned 15 that September. The South was a very different place in ’64 and most who write of “Southern Strategies” and such commit the sins of historical ignorance and presentism.
While The South was wracked with racial unrest and Southerners almost universally considered themselves beseiged by the Yankees over “civil rights,” The South was also just beginning to be able on any large scale to participate in the major US economy and enjoy something resembling the standard of living the rest of the Country took for granted. Atlanta was the economic and cultural capital of The South, had just passed through 1 Million in population in the late ’50s, and styled itself “The City Too Busy to Hate.” Outside Atlanta, Charlotte, and some of the other bigger towns most people could still tell you what company and regiment gg/grandaddy served in, and for all too many of them where he was killed. Most Southerners viscerally hated Yankees generally and Yankee Republicans specifically. White supremacy was as unquestioned as the air you breathed in a White Only restaurant, not that many Southerners outside the cities ever went to restaurants, or the water you drank from a White Only water cooler. But there were chinks in The Solid South; Ike got more support than a Republican typically would because of his War record, Nixon got more than he might have because Kennedy was both “liberal” and Catholic. There were a LOT of “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards and most everybody thought that governors like Faubus were just standing up for the rights of their state. There are a lot of born-again liberals these days but I assure you that Southerners all knew that “states’ rights” was code for segregation. My family were “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it” Primitive Baptists, and in that fateful summer of ’64 I heard more sermons on the evils of the pending Civil Rights Bill than anything else. Unless you were there, you simply have no idea how intently Southerners attended to Congress’ consideration of the Civil Rights Act, and July 2, 1964, the day it passed, was little less traumatic in The South than was July 4, 1863, the day Lee began his withdrawal from Gettysburg.
I assure you that George Romney, a Yankee, a Republican, and a supporter of Civil Rights legislation hadn’t a hope in Hell of any “Southern Strategy” in 1964. Goldwater was not the only Republican troubled by the “public accomodations” piece of the law and Republican opposition to that provision was instrumental in stalling the bill in ’63. I accept that Goldwater’s opposition to the ’64 Bill was on federalism and libertarian grounds, but that isn’t what ANY Southerner heard when anybody talked about “States’ Rights,” a term Southerners had been hanging their hat on to protect their “peculiar institutions” for a very long time. While Goldwater carried the Lower South, interestingly it was young people who showed the most enthusiasm for him; I carried my first political sign that fall. States’ Rights or not, a lot of the older folk had never voted for a Republican and weren’t going to start now. People too young to have heard gg/grandmother’s stories of the day the letter or telegram came could be a little more tolerant of Republicans.
By ’68, The South was changing rapidly and dramatically and while Nixon’s “law and order” may have seemed to be code to lots of Southerners, the real problem with Humphrey was he was such a liberal. No matter what Nixon’s strategy might have been, a more moderate Democrat, especially a Southerner, could have carried The South as Carter proved eight years later. I don’t doubt that Nixon’s campaign saw great opportunity in The South, but most of that opportunity was created by the Democrats having chosen such an archetypal liberal.
Art Chance, thanks for writing your well-thought history. In 1965 I graduated high school from a segregated school system in south-central Oklahoma on the edge of ‘little Dixie’. By a large majority the kids of my time and our parents set down and disowned the patterns and language of racism. Just put the n-word outside our vocabulary. We looked forward to private opinions formed by judging character instead of skin color. The ‘public accommodations’ law did seem unfair to private property rights but the idea of one nation being opened for all it’s citizens did seem as important as the private right to be prejudiced individually.
I remember later we were surprised that race-riots developed in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. We thought we were the bad guys, and those other places were where the enlightened ones lived in peace. But I was just 20 years old.
I grew up in the South, born in 1953, in the only NC county that was solidy Republican at the time. Every racist jerk I knew was a Democrat. The Klan was an arm of the Democrat party in the South and everybody knew it.
Politics like everything else has to be viewed through the lens of history. Today JFK would be called a raving Nazi by the leadership of the Democratic party. Anybody one step to the right of Lenin is too conservative for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.
No, Hitler really was Austrian and Beethoven really was German. The joke goes that the most successful public relations campaign in history was Austrians convincing the world that Hitler was German and Beethoven was Austrian.