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‘The Real Romney,’ by Michael Kranish and Scott
Helman By GEOFFREY KABASERVICE It’s unlikely
that Mitt Romney saw the film “The Graduate” when it
appeared in 1967. He was a 20­-year­-old Mormon
missionary in France at the time, isolated from the
cultural influences that shaped most Americans of the
baby­-boom generation, and his taste in movies ran to
more wholesome fare like “The Sound of Music.” If he
had seen it, though, one doubts that he would have
scoffed along with his contemporaries during the
scene in which a smarmy businessman declares that
the key to the future is “plastics.” He might have
considered it useful career advice. Critics have noted
Romney’s plastic qualities ever since he entered
politics: the elasticity of his views, the android
awkwardness of his interactions with voters, his slick
evasions and platitudes, his sculptured features and
molded hair, and his apparent lack of appetites and
passions. But plastic is also durable and
indispensable, and although a majority of Republican
voters in the primaries so far have preferred Anyone
but Romney, he appears poised to win the party’s
presidential nomination. Despite the growing possibility
that Romney may soon occupy the nation’s highest
office, he remains an enigma to most Americans, and
his campaign seems predicated on the hope that
voters will see in his smooth surfaces whatever they
want to see. The great service of this new biography
by the Boston Globe journalists Michael Kranish and
Scott Helman is that it humanizes Romney. The
authors sniff over their subject with bloodhound
thoroughness, dredging up old report cards, housing
deeds, and family records and videos. They interview
seemingly everyone who had contact with Romney in
every phase of his life. They conclude that he is in
many ways an admirable man, deeply devoted to his
religion and family and possessing stellar qualities that
made him a success in business and public service,
including his leadership of the 2002 Winter Olympics
and his governorship of Massachusetts from 2003 to
2007. But “The Real Romney” leaves an unsettling
impression. Romney’s peculiar misfortune is that the
things that defined him have become liabilities in his
presidential pursuit, leading him to minimize or
repudiate his own beliefs, legacy and
accomplishments. Even as he shifts into the
front­-runner’s role, he is running on who he is not —
namely, Barack Obama — rather than on who he is,
and cannot stand openly for the things that matter
most to him. If Obama is our first post­-racial president,
Romney, with his strategy of absences and denials,
bids to become our first postmodern president.
Romney’s political problems begin, in a basic sense,
Romney vs. Romney
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with his family history. The authors trace the
intertwined histories of Romney’s ancestors and the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter­-day Saints, beginning
with his great­-great­-grandfather Miles Archibald
Romney, who became an early convert to Mormonism
in 1837. Mitt’s great­-grandfather had undertaken the
pioneer journey to the Utah Territory as a boy, and
when he refused to abandon what Mormons
considered the divinely ordained practice of “plural
marriage” — he had three wives at that point — he fled
federal agents to establish a colony in Mexico; the
family remained there after the Mormon Church
agreed to ban po­-lygamy in 1890 as a condition of
Utah’s gaining statehood. Mitt’s grandfather was not
polygamous and returned destitute to the United
States after Mexican rebels confiscated the colony’s
property. Mitt’s father, George Romney, was elected
governor of Michigan in 1962, ran unsuccessfully for
president in 1968, and became a member of Richard
Nixon’s cabinet as secretary of housing and urban
­-development. It’s an exotic but unquestionably
American success story, even though the first
generations of Mormon Romneys spent their lives in
bitter conflict with the United States. Mitt Romney
takes evident “pride in his standing” as a member of
“one of Mormonism’s first families,” according to
Kranish and Helman. He has given the church millions
of dollars and has occupied high positions in its
hierarchy. He abides by his faith’s prohibitions on
alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and profanity. The authors
portray him as an adoring husband, a devoted father
and a doer of many unpublicized good deeds.
Mormonism’s emphasis on family, patriotism,
community and hard work explains much of Romney’s
worldview. The church’s generous support of Mormons
in need, financed by the 10 percent tithe on members
like Romney, may give him the idea that the poor are
well taken care of in America. And his criticism of “the
bitter politics of envy” echoes his father’s complaint
that his family was forced from his childhood home
“because the Mexicans were envious of the fact that
my people . . . became prosperous.” Romney’s plastic
image to some extent stems from his difficulty in
relating to people outside Mormon circles, though
within those circles he is seen as warm, funny and
charming. His upstanding life fails to win Romney the
political credit that would normally extend to such a
paragon, because many people do not understand or
approve of the religion that inspires him. Over the last
several years, about a quarter of Americans have told
poll takers they would not vote for a Mormon. Liberals
are skeptical of a religion that until 1978 refused to
grant full membership to anybody with even one drop
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