Romney: A Reckoning

When Mitt Romney ran for president, his public presentation focused primarily on his political and business record, not his faith. Yet Romney was not only the first (and, so far, only) member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to receive the presidential nomination from a major party, but he was also deeply shaped by his faith, including his service in leadership and missionary roles. Thus when journalist and fellow Latter-day Saint McKay Coppins set out to write a political biography of the Republican politician who served as governor of Massachusetts, senator from Utah, and presidential nominee of his party, he found that his conversations with Romney frequently turned to matters of faith.Romney was descended from a long line of LDS Church members stretching back to the nineteenth-century West, but faith was practiced quietly in the home where he grew up as the son of Michigan governor George Romney. Only during his two-year mission trip to France following his freshman year at Stanford did Romney become serious about his faith and determined to live his life in service to others. During the next two decades, he combined his successful career in business as an executive at Bain Capital with service to the church.In matters of church politics, as in state and national secular politics, Romney was a moderate and pragmatist who was willing to listen to dissenting views and find centrist solutions. He broke with tradition to allow women in his stake to deliver sermons in settings that were previously dedicated to male speakers, and he also pushed for men to be assigned to assist with church childcare duties. However, he did not support calls for the church to open the priesthood to women.Likewise, in politics Romney was a fiscally conservative centrist who was personally conservative on some social issues but willing to take a more moderate, pragmatic approach when it came to public law in a pluralistic society. When he challenged Ted Kennedy for his seat in the US Senate in 1994 (a race that Romney lost), Republican Party officials in Massachusetts advised him that an opponent of abortion rights could not win in Massachusetts; Romney dutifully branded himself pro-choice, despite his personal moral reservations about abortion.Romney was drawn to public service not because of an ideological agenda but because he believed he could be an effective solution-finder, just as he was as a manager at Bain Capital. His successful oversight of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City rejuvenated his political career. He was elected governor of Massachusetts in 2002 and used his position to pursue pragmatic solutions that did not neatly square with either liberal or conservative ideologies. He created the first state universal health insurance system in the country, but he also cut funding from the state university system to eliminate academic departments that were no longer attracting many students.Romney attempted to use his achievements as Massachusetts governor as a launching point for his campaign for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. However, he quickly ran into a problem: his moderately liberal positions on abortion, guns, and gay rights, which had allowed him to get elected in culturally liberal Massachusetts, did not pass muster with Republican primary voters. Romney moved to the right on each of those issues and came across as insincere. “The truth,” Coppins notes, “was that he simply didn't place much of a premium on unwavering political positions” (83); he was a pragmatic manager, not an ideologue. But this approach was an uneasy fit for twenty-first-century American politics.Romney wanted to be president because he “believed he was the only presidential prospect who could deliver the country from widespread unemployment and economic stagnation” (97). He therefore tacked to the right to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Much to his later chagrin, he even secured an endorsement from Donald Trump. But Romney ultimately failed to excite the party base, and he lost the election amid perceptions that he was a wealthy patrician out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. Although he subsequently won election to the US Senate from Utah—the one state where he thought that he would be welcomed, with support from his fellow church members—he found himself increasingly at odds even with Utah Republicans after he became the only Republican in the Senate to vote in favor of convicting Trump during his first impeachment trial. From then on, he found himself a pariah in the party, an unusual position for a man who had won the party's presidential nomination less than a decade earlier. Romney may not have valued ideological consistency, but as someone who had always tried to live by the precepts of his faith, personal character mattered to him. When he decided that Trump did not pass the character test, he broke with him, at the cost of his political future.Coppins's biography, based heavily on lengthy interviews with Romney, paints an admiring portrait of a man who found himself increasingly out of step with his party and with contemporary politics precisely because he insisted on holding true to the values shaped by his faith. Ironically, as Coppins notes, even many of Romney's fellow LDS Church members did not appreciate Romney's application of these values, as the scorn that he experienced from fellow Mormon Republicans after he voted to convict Trump indicated.Because so much of this biography is based on Romney's own statements, it offers an insightful window into the thinking of the most prominent Mormon Republican politician of the twenty-first century. When archival records from Romney's political career are available to historians, scholars may be able to go beyond the narrative that Coppins presents, but for now, Coppins's biography offers the most comprehensive overview of Romney's political beliefs and religious convictions.