Romney vs. McCain:
Different strokes
By Scot Lehigh, Globe Columnist | June 22, 2005
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IT'S OBVIOUS that both Mitt Romney and John McCain want to be the Republican Party's next presidential nominee. So let's compare the two top-tier (likely) candidates as they test the national waters.
If you're a Republican activist in one of the states where his Commonwealth PAC has been sprinkling money about, you may have read rave reviews about Romney, courtesy of the ''memorandum" political aides Darrell Crate and Trent Wisecup sent out in early June.
Romney, it reports, has battled Harvard, Ted Kennedy, and legislative Democrats to ban ''human cloning," a term that makes somatic cell nuclear transfer sound far more sinister than it is.
He's fighting for an income tax cut, against tuition breaks for illegal immigrants, for tougher workfare, for abstinence education, and for the death penalty.
And then, of course, there's his crusade against gay marriage.
Last week, the governor dropped his previous (tactical) support for a proposed state constitutional amendment that would forbid gay marriage but institute civil unions in favor of one that would simply impose a gay-marriage ban. In so doing, Romney abandoned an amendment that at least makes an effort to be fair to same-sex couples to endorse a measure that includes no provision for them.
Now, Republican recipients of the Commonwealth PAC memo may see all that as the determined leadership of a principled conservative. (Of course, out-of-state observers who value results rather than mere scrappiness might also view Romney's won-loss record on the issues and conclude that when it comes to Beacon Hill fisticuffs, he is more glass-jawed palooka than potent political pugilist.)
From a Massachusetts perspective, however, what Romney is doing looks like presidential primary panderama. When he ran for governor in 2002, one of Romney's strongest selling points was that he was beholden to no one. But the man who won the governorship by portraying himself as independent enough to stand up to powerful Democratic interests here now seems awfully eager to placate Republican activists and ideologues everywhere else.
One can see that most vividly on abortion. In his 1994 Senate run, Romney maintained that his support for abortion rights dated back to his mother's 1970 campaign for the US Senate. In 2002, with Romney vowing he wouldn't change the state's prochoice status quo, a campaign spokesman insisted his stand was ''exactly the same position as any other prochoice politician."
No longer. If the Commonwealth PAC had addressed that issue, it would have had to include a sentence like this: ''As he fights to distance himself from his past support of abortion rights, Governor Romney has now evolved to such a degree that his staff declines to tell home-state reporters what his post-2006 stand might be."
Romney aides object to the notion that his positions have been crafted with an eye to presidential politics, insisting they emanate from heartfelt belief. If so, it's certainly convenient that the governor's heart usually tells him pretty much what GOP activists want to hear on key issues.
Contrast that to the way McCain has conducted himself.
On ''Meet the Press" on Sunday, the Arizona senator disagreed with Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that the Iraq insurgency is in its last throes, saying that the president needs to acknowledge that a long, hard slog lies ahead. With the Republican administration trying to simply edit global warming away, McCain has co-sponsored legislation with Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, to reduce greenhouse gases.
Despite the Republican right's demand that the Senate put an end to the filibustering of judicial nominees, McCain, in late May, helped engineer a bipartisan pact to preserve that Senate right.
In December, McCain declared he has no confidence in Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Last July, he voted against a proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, saying it contravened state's rights. He opposed both of the Bush tax-cut packages, calling the first tilted too much toward the wealthy, the second inappropriate in wartime. Chastising the Republican Congress for spending like a drunken sailor, he has also called on Bush to veto some of that largesse.
Although he proved himself a loyal Republican during the presidential campaign, McCain is no favorite of the far right. But among others, he's considered a straight shooter, one widely admired for his independence and his willingness to speak his mind.
As McCain and Romney explore national candidacies, here's a question the governor might want to ponder: In a race that emphasizes character, who seems more his own man?
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com |
