Mitt's Campaign: Family Ties and Outside-the-Beltway Accomplishments

BOSTON — What kind of a name is "Mitt" anyway?

The former Massachusetts governor who has risen to the top tier of Republican presidential hopefuls was named for his father's first cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, who played quarterback for the Chicago Bears in the 1920s.

The unusual name illustrates how breeding, connections and sports have helped the second Mitt Romney leap ahead of better-known rivals in public opinion polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first votes will be cast in the presidential selection process, if not in national preference surveys.

His connections are outside the Beltway.

"Washington has been broken over this past decade or two," Romney told supporters recently. He has sought to separate himself not only from an unpopular President Bush but also from Sen. John McCain of Arizona, former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and other nationally known Republican candidates. "We have to clean up our own house, too," he said.

The candidate's father, of course, was George Romney, former Republican governor of Michigan and an early presidential aspirant himself in the 1968 GOP campaign. Mitt Romney's first name is Willard, in honor of J. Willard Marriott, hotel magnate and best friend of the elder Romney. Both the Romneys and Marriotts were devout Mormons.

The candidate's personal wealth is estimated at more than $200 million. The former venture capitalist has already contributed $9 million of his own money to his campaign and indicated that he is willing to give more.

"I'm not beholden to any particular group for getting me in this race or getting me elected," he told reporters at a campaign stop. "My family, that's the only one I'm really beholden to."

And sports revived the younger Mitt's political career after his first run at elective office ended with a defeat to incumbent Democrat Ted Kennedy in the 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts. The turnabout came when Romney was recruited in 1999 to take over scandal-plagued Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

There was some irony there, said Tagg Romney, 37, the oldest of the candidate's five sons. After the Olympics selection, Tagg called in congratulations but teased that the sons — knowing their dad's modest athletic abilities — could not have conceived of circumstances that would have led to him being pictured on the front page of the USA Today sports section.

The 2002 Games were threatened by debt, corruption and construction delays.

"People across America had lost faith in the Olympics spirit," recalled Craig Romney, 26, the youngest son. One way his father rejuvenated interest was by training in the skeleton — which is like the luge except the rider goes down the icy chute face first at about 80 mph.

"It's one of the craziest sports in the world," said Craig. "And my dad is not exactly a thrill seeker."

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Ann Davies was about 8 years old when she first encountered her future husband — a mischievous Mitt Romney.

"He threw rocks at my horse," she recalled at the Romney 2008 campaign headquarters in Boston's historic North End.

Both lived in affluent suburbs outside Detroit. Before entering politics, George Romney had taken over American Motors, then lagging far behind the Big Three automakers of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. He made Ramblers the first compact cars in the era of big fins. On the campaign trail now, Mitt Romney tells audiences that his sons gave him a restored 1962 Rambler American for his recent 60th birthday.

In the 1960s, when Mitt and Ann met again after the horse incident, he was the son of the governor.

"We really noticed each other at a high school party when I was 16 and he was 18," she said. "He was pretty cute. And he had this enormous personality.

"Trust me, at that time I did not envision all of this," she said, gesturing toward scores of clean-cut campaign workers — men in ties, women in high heels — phoning prospective supporters. "He was the class clown at that point."

They quickly were seriously in love, she said. When she was still in high school, he told her, "I want to marry you eventually."

But at the age of 19, Mitt Romney went to France on the two-year mission that most young Mormon men undertake.

"He was the first Mormon I ever met," said Ann, who was raised an Episcopalian but converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints.

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As president and CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, Romney survived his televised skeleton run. The Winter Games were a financial and athletic success. Romney used the resulting praise and publicity to help propel his 2002 election to governor of Massachusetts.

"The state faced a fiscal crisis when he came to office" with a projected budget shortfall of more than $2 billion, said Michael Widmar, president of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. "The administration and the legislature, which was and is overwhelmingly Democratic, did a responsible job of closing this large budget gap."

But it took higher revenues as well as spending cuts to bring about a balanced budget, he said.

"When the former governor says he didn't raise taxes, it's true he didn't raise broad-based income taxes and sales taxes," said Widmar. "But they did raise new revenues through higher fees and new corporate taxes."

"I see no distinction between a tax and a fee and he raised just about every fee that the state charges. It was all done so he could say he balanced the budget without raising taxes," said Ron Vining, co-founder of Massachusetts Republicans for Truth.

"His focus from the time he became governor was to set himself up to be president," said Vining, who worked in Romney's unsuccessful Senate campaign against Kennedy.

Now running for president, Romney rarely mentions what many consider a landmark achievement of his administration: the Massachusetts statewide health care coverage plan. Like the other GOP candidates, he campaigns against government-run health care systems. He also admits changing his mind on the emotional abortion issue — from pro-choice to pro-life.

The evolving position on abortion is not the only changing stance that has some on the right-wing of his party questioning whether Romney is truly a social conservative.

"It's a legitimate question. He has clearly flip-flopped on a number of issues, including abortion and gay rights," said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia and author of several books on presidential campaigns. "This is always a question with presidential candidates: What do they really believe in?"

In his 1994 Senate race, Romney pledged to be a more effective champion for gay causes than Kennedy, his Democratic rival, and said he supported the "don't ask, don't tell" military policy created by former President Bill Clinton. He described it as "the first in a number of steps that will ultimately lead to gays and lesbians being able to serve openly and honestly in our nation's military." On the campaign trail, however, he focuses on his opposition to a decision by the state's supreme court to legalize gay marriage.

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Presidential candidate Romney may be the first Mormon ever encountered by many of the conservative Christians who help form the base of the Republican Party, especially in the South.

"I got over it," laughed Ann Romney. "If people see us and hear us, they get over their reservations pretty quickly."

But religion could be an obstacle to Romney winning voters who are put off by McCain, Thompson and Rudy Giuliani, who are all divorced and, for the former New York City mayor, on the wrong side of the abortion issue for these voters.

Conservative southern Christians "won't vote for Mitt en masse. There are still misgivings and misunderstandings about Mormonism," said the Rev. Joel Hunter of the Northland Church, an evangelical mega-congregation in Longwood, Fla.

On the moderate end of this regional religious spectrum, some voters will take a wider view of the candidate and see the "attractive part" of Romney: "his dedication to family and his values," said Hunter.

"On the fundamentalist end, you have a lot of southern Christians who say, 'I'm not voting for a Mormon. It's just a cult," said the minister.

"I expect people to ask questions about what I believe," said Romney. "I'm going to stand by my faith. There's nothing to be embarrassed about."

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Romney married the former Ann Davies in 1969, soon after his mission ended and a year after his father lost the Republican nomination to Richard Nixon. Mormonism was not as much a factor in those primaries as the elder Romney's choice of words when he said that American generals had "brainwashed" him into early support of the Vietnam War during a visit to Southeast Asia.

After graduating from Brigham Young University and earning both a law degree and M.B.A. from Harvard, Mitt Romney stayed in Boston and worked as a business consultant before forming his own investment firm, Bain Capital, and became wealthy helping in the start-up of firms, including Staples, Sports Authority and Domino's Pizza.

During those years, the Romney house in suburban Belmont, Mass., was "rowdy, rambunctious, out of control," said Anne. Twice a year, during the summer and at Christmas, they would load up the five sons in a station wagon for a 12-hour drive to a family cabin on the Canadian shore of Lake Huron.

On these trips, the boys learned their Grandfather Romney, whom they called Barta, had endowed them with a measure of fame.

"People would recognize our name, which was odd to me," said Tagg.

To some outsiders, the fit, attractive, devoutly Mormon Romneys seem like the Osmonds, minus Marie.

The candidate joked about the image to Jay Leno on "The Tonight Show." Romney said he likes "kick back and have a good time" but juicy details will never come out in the media because "what goes on in Disneyland stays in Disneyland."

Tagg said the family is what it seems.

"Faith was very important to us growing up," he said. "It's an important part of who we are."

The sons — who share a "Five Brothers" campaign blog — all went on Mormon missions. All are now married. Mitt and Ann have 10 grandchildren.

Romney supporters believe the candidate's family personifies the issues that will help him win over Southern voters.

Romney recalled a T-shirt that he saw at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis last year.

"It said: 'Yankee Governor. Southern Values.'"