In 1964, George Romney, the Republican governor of Michigan, withheld his support from his party’s presidential nominee because of Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights. Four years later, the elder Romney was briefly the GOP front-runner himself until he made a rash and candid admission that his initial support for the Vietnam War was the result of “brainwashing” by generals and diplomats. Telling the truth killed George Romney’s White House hopes, but his principles remained intact.
At the time, the Republican Party was at a hinge point and heading in a hard right direction. Richard M. Nixon would go on to win not only the nomination but also the presidency, extinguishing the brand of progressive Republicanism that George Romney represented.
As he wrote his son, who at the time was a Mormon missionary in France, George Romney had no regrets and saw no shame in the fact that he could not turn his party from the direction in which it was headed. From memory, Mitt Romney recited to me from the final page of that letter: “We went into this not because we aspired to the office, but simply because we felt that under the circumstances we would not feel right if we did not offer our service. As I have said on many occasions, I aspired, and though I achieved not, I am satisfied.”
At the age of 76, Mitt Romney has achieved plenty, albeit not the high office that eluded both him and his father. He fell short of winning the GOP nomination in 2008, but won it in 2012, only to lose the general election and the presidency to Barack Obama.
In 2018, Utah sent him to the Senate with nearly 63 percent of its vote, but the truth is, Romney would have struggled to win even the 2024 Republican primary there after standing up over and over again to Donald Trump.
When he announced on Wednesday that he would not run for reelection, I hoped that Mitt Romney, like the father he once told me was “the definition of a successful human,” was satisfied about the arc of his career, and glad that he did not bend his principles for Trump.
His greatest apostasy, in the eyes of the party base, was being the lone GOP senator to vote to convict the then-president of abuse of power in the first impeachment trial, which stemmed from Trump’s efforts to pressure Ukraine for dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. You could almost hear George Romney in the speech that his son gave on the Senate floor: “I will tell my children and their children that I did my duty to the best of my ability, believing that my country expected it of me.”
A year later, Romney was one of but seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump in a second impeachment trial, this one coming in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s pretty clear that the party is inclined to a populist demagogue message,” Romney told my colleague Dan Balz. But he has not given up on the GOP. “If it can change in the direction of a populist,” he said, “it can change back in the direction of my wing of the Republican Party.”
But that, Romney said, should be left to a new generation, which he hopes will “step up” and “shape the world they’re going to live in.” The suggestion there was clear: He does not want to be part of the Washington gerontocracy, pronounced in the Senate, that refuses to move aside.
Romney found the Senate more satisfying than former governors usually do, and he cites as his proudest achievements there the contributions he made to bringing about bipartisan agreement on a covid-19 relief bill when Trump was president and on an infrastructure deal during the Biden administration.
What I think will be remembered by history as his most significant accomplishment, however, was paving the way for national health-care reform.
As governor, Romney made Massachusetts the first state in the nation to guarantee health coverage for all. It was a model for what would eventually become Obama’s Affordable Care Act — though that was not a comparison Romney was always comfortable about acknowledging.
Romney told Balz that he remains confident that the constitutional norms and institutions of this country will hold, even if its leaders don’t always stand for them. Maybe he is right. But we should still hope there is a Mitt Romney or two in the generation that follows him.
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