Mitt Isn’t Ready to Call It Quits
By MARK LEIBOVICH
“Hey, Ann, can you come here a sec?” Mitt Romney called out, sinking into the cushions of a walnut-colored easy chair, his legs outstretched on a matching ottoman. Romney’s blue work shirt was tucked into faded jeans; sockless ankles peeked out from his New Balance sneakers. He paused as Ann Romney entered from the kitchen, where she was baking chocolate-chip cookies. “Sweetie,” he continued, “what are some of the items we gave away at the Yankee swap?”
It was a September morning, and the Romneys were closing up their summer house in Wolfeboro, N.H. The place, which is vast and uncluttered, had a decidedly empty-nester vibe. Framed family photos were clustered on shelves; half-packed bags were strewn around the kitchen. The silence in the living room was accentuated by the distant whine of motorboats on Lake Winnipesaukee. After years of traveling entourages, the Romneys now live alone. There were no staff members or aides or handlers; no phones rang. Nothing announced the presence of an almost-president, other than a sign on the porch: “Ann and Mitt Romney: Tennis, Volleyball, Water-Sports.” A single Cadillac SRX was parked in the driveway as a flock of geese orbited overhead. “Darn geese,” Romney said, “keep pooping all over the lawn.”
The Romneys are in downsizing mode. They have sold their Belmont, Mass., townhouse, and they also might sell the villa in La Jolla, Calif., which they purchased for $12 million in 2008 — the one with the zoning and renovation troubles, the disdainful Democratic neighbors and the much-derided plans for a car elevator. On a lark, they recently decided to make their permanent home in Utah, where they are building a house adjacent to one of their five sons’ 2.5-acre property.
The relocation has not been without its practical concerns. When you run for president twice, you tend to accumulate huge amounts of campaign souvenirs, gifts and other detritus. However elusive the ultimate prize, the trunkloads of consolation trophies endure: There are the plaques, the awards and the occasional engraved glass eagle (“I got it for a speech or something”). Then there are the homemade portraits of the candidate, sent in by supporters. The Romneys have also saved 22 of each campaign T-shirt, button and poster — one for each of their grandchildren. From Ann’s $1,000-a-plate birthday luncheon in April 2012, they have saved the cake topping of her on horseback that was commissioned by Donald Trump.
Had the election turned out differently, these tokens might have found a nice home in some government facility, en route to a presidential library. Instead, Romney was forced to cram them into his garage in Wolfeboro. When he began to worry that the snowy winters would foster mold, he loaded what he could into a horse trailer and paid a guy named Poppy to drive it across the country. Before he left, the Romneys hosted a giveaway party, or Yankee swap, for the things they didn’t want.
“What about that elephant purse?” Ann said, arriving from the kitchen in a light blue blouse and jeans. “Did you mention the elephant purse?”
“Ah, the elephant purse,” Mitt said, nodding. A very nice woman had given it to him, perhaps in Iowa, or maybe Ohio or Nevada. “She made it with that puff paint,” Mitt said. “It had those, what do you call them, bedazzle beads.” Ron Kaufman, a longtime adviser, snared this particular keepsake at the Yankee swap.
“Very appropriate,” Ann said. “Ron is the king of tchotchkes.”
“The best was the bust of Ronald Reagan,” Romney continued. “It was plaster but bronzed. Or it looked like it was bronzed. It said, ‘Governor Mitt Romney, the Reagan Freedom Award,’ or something of that nature.” His tone had hardened a little, acquiring the edge of a sarcastic boast. “I actually have several busts of Ronald Reagan that have been presented to me,” he said. Then the room fell silent as Ann returned to the kitchen to set out a small buffet of sliced turkey, corned beef, two loaves of Pepperidge Farm bread (white and wheat) and a selection of both mayonnaise and Miracle Whip. Romney, sinking back in his chair, looked out the window as more geese flew by.
After losing the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2012, Romney expected to become a political empty-nester of sorts — a “loser for life,” as he predicted in “Mitt,” the Netflix documentary about his two presidential campaigns. (“Mike Dukakis, you know, he can’t get a job mowing lawns,” he remarked at the time.) Unlike John McCain and John Kerry, Romney didn’t have a job to return to in the Senate. Unlike Al Gore, he had already amassed extraordinary wealth. Romney, who is 67, was left to confront the vacuum of a long retirement, come what may.
Being the first nominee to nurse his defeat fully in the social-media age brought its own indignities. Gore could go away and grow a beard, then get rich, fat and separated from his wife, all in relative obscurity. Romney, by contrast, has posed dutifully for Instagram photos with commercial-airline companions (“airports are the worst”), supermarket employees and staff members at Wahoo’s Fish Taco. He briefly inspired a hashtag, #SelfiesWithMitt. Recently he was taking an early-morning jog in Arkansas, where he was campaigning for the Republican gubernatorial candidate, Asa Hutchinson, when a woman accosted him. “You’re John Kerry! You’re John Kerry!” she yelled. He tried to correct her, but she wasn’t buying it; she kept running alongside him. “I said, ‘I’m not John Kerry — I’m Tom Brady,’ ” Romney recalled. At that, she left him alone.
As a candidate, Romney often appeared as if he were bracing for a light fixture to drop on his head. On this September morning, though, he seemed far more at ease. No doubt some of his buoyancy could be ascribed to a postdefeat surge of popularity. G.O.P. candidates had been begging him to campaign and raise money for them; polls had found that he would defeat Obama in a rerun of 2012. A number of Romney’s seemingly askew assertions during the campaign — like identifying Russia as the United States’ greatest geopolitical threat — now looked prescient. An online “Draft Mitt” petition had already accumulated more than 120,000 votes of support.
Romney shrugged off the recent attention, citing the natural human tendency to covet the unavailable. (“If you live in the mountains, you long for the trees and the lakes,” he said. “If you live in the trees and the lakes. . . .”) And yet a confluence of political realities has created a genuine opening for a Romney third act. As Obama struggles through a difficult final term, there is a lack of a clear Republican heir apparent. Presumptive early front-runners, like Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, have shown themselves to be flawed or reluctant or both. A splintering of possible movement candidates (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz) could beget a need for a default consensus choice.
Romney, for his part, is noticeably playing along. He recently told a radio host that he was not planning on running for president but allowed that “circumstances can change.” A recent column by the conservative pundit Byron York noted that Romney had kept in close contact with many of his advisers and aides. As we spoke, Romney compared the barrage of 2016-related questions to a scene in the film “Dumb and Dumber.” After Jim Carrey’s character is flatly rejected by Lauren Holly, she tells him that there’s a one-in-a-million chance she would change her mind. “So,” Romney told me, embodying the character, “Jim Carrey says, ‘You’re telling me there’s a chance.’ ”
This was the obvious opening for me to ask if there was a chance. Romney’s response was decidedly meta — “I have nothing to add to the story” — but he then fell into the practiced political parlance of nondenial. “We’ve got a lot of people looking at the race,” he said. “We’ll see what happens.”
As deftly as Romney plays the self-deprecating bridesmaid, he is open about his dread of becoming irrelevant. After his father, George Romney, a three-term Michigan governor, lost the state’s primary in 1968, he struggled to get meetings. “I remember my dad becoming quite frustrated,” Romney said. “He used to say that Washington is the fastest place to go from ‘Who’s Who’ to ‘Who’s That?’ ” In the saturated media landscape of today, the son has been luckier. “I have been able to get on TV, get key interviews, get op-eds published,” Romney said. When I showed up in Wolfeboro, as Romney led me to the living room, he made sure we were on the record. “You have a tape recorder? Notebook?” he asked me as he was describing the potential mold problems of New Hampshire storage. He wanted to make sure I got this.
Romney also seemed eager to put much less frivolous points on the record. He spoke dismissively about his visit to the White House shortly after the 2012 election — the cursory meeting in which the former combatants are supposed to play gracious, take pictures together and make noises about issues on which they might work together in the future. “It was intended to check a box,” Romney said of the president’s invitation. He was not offered any follow-up, which was typical, Romney said, according to what he heard from some of his executive friends. “No one gets the impression that what they are saying is being incorporated,” he told me. “I won’t mention who it was, but I met with one of the nation’s top Republican leaders, and he said, ‘You know the strange thing is that the president seems to answer to only two people — Valerie Jarrett and Michelle Obama.’ ”
Romney derided Obama for his continual complaints about Republican intransigence. “That’s the nature of democracy,” he said, shaking his head with an exaggerated grimace. He contrasted this with the exemplary bipartisan record of, for instance, himself. When he was governor of Massachusetts, Romney reminded me, he always worked with the state’s liberal stalwart, Ted Kennedy. “Ted Kennedy would do the work,” Romney said, in contrast to the state’s other longtime senator. “John Kerry was always in front of the camera but not out doing the hard work.” He called Hillary Clinton an “enabler” of Obama’s foreign policy and said he was concerned by the isolationist inclination of likely Republican presidential candidates like Rand Paul. Romney told me that he was more passionate about foreign affairs than he showed in the 2012 campaign, which was largely given over to domestic affairs. It went without saying that this probably wouldn’t be the case in 2016.
“Mitt,” which was released in January, portrayed the candidate as a family man — vulnerable, funny and cognizant of the absurdity of his undertaking. “One of the big frustrations a lot of us had on the campaign is that people weren’t seeing the guy we all know in private,” said Representative Paul Ryan, Romney’s running mate in 2012, offering a familiar complaint. “The ‘Mitt’ documentary was a very good picture of that guy.” I asked Ryan if the film’s warm portrayal might argue for a looser, less scripted approach to campaigns. “The pressure you get from the consultant class to conform to the norm and do these stock standard things drives me nuts, personally,” he said.
When I asked Romney the same question, however, he said the exact opposite. “There will be no free time in the back of the plane where you’d just go back and shoot the breeze with the media,” he told me. He would do this occasionally, but his aides argued against it. “They were always afraid that, you know, I’d make some little joke or someone would ask some question that couldn’t be answered — you know, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ ” Romney told me that during the campaign, the F.B.I. informed him that a foreign government — he wouldn’t say which — was reading his emails. This was another reminder that there could be no safe zone, no such thing as an unplugged candidate. “The era of spontaneity in politics is over,” he declared, as I immediately wondered when it had started.
“I was talking to one of my political advisers,” Romney continued, “and I said: ‘If I had to do this again, I’d insist that you literally had a camera on me at all times” — essentially employing his own tracker, as opposition researchers call them. “I want to be reminded that this is not off the cuff.” This, as he saw it, was what got him in trouble at that Boca Raton fund-raiser, when Romney told the crowd he was writing off the 47 percent of the electorate that supported Obama (a.k.a. “those people”; “victims” who take no “personal responsibility”). Romney told me that the statement came out wrong, because it was an attempt to placate a rambling supporter who was saying that Obama voters were essentially deadbeats.
“My mistake was that I was speaking in a way that reflected back to the man,” Romney said. “If I had been able to see the camera, I would have remembered that I was talking to the whole world, not just the man.” I had never heard Romney say that he was prompted into the “47 percent” line by a ranting supporter. It was also impossible to ignore the phrase “If I had to do this again.”
Romney’s camera-at-all-times plan, however, reflected his own limitations as a candidate. By the same token, it was quite an indictment that “Mitt” — made by a little-known filmmaker on a shoestring — created a more palatable rendering of Romney than his campaign, which spent hundreds of millions on genius operatives and image makers. Romney, for his part, seemed to understand this. No matter how content he appeared, when the conversation turned to his disappointment in losing, his voice dropped. “It really kills me,” he said. “It really kills me.” He became inaudible, and it seemed as if he might tear up.
As if to rescue him, Ann called out from the kitchen that lunch was ready. Mitt remained in the living room, now staring at the floor. “The consequences of my loss are very clear to me and to a lot of people,” he said. “And that’s really hard.” His voice dropped to nearly a whisper, before he caught himself and quickly pivoted. “Let’s get a sandwich!” he bellowed.
Following behind, I informed the defending Republican nominee that I would now be turning off my tape recorder and that he could relax. “Oh,” he said, “you can keep recording.”
