Mitt Romney announced his retirement from the Senate. As Massachusetts governor, Romney invented the model for Obamacare, became a critic of Donald Trump and supporter of impeachment, and couldn’t arrest the party’s authoritarian lurch.
The party’s last antiauthoritarian walks away.
Mitt Romney on Wednesday announced his retirement from the Senate, likely signaling an end to a career of noble tragedy. By the end, he saw more clearly than almost anybody in his party the authoritarian path it was following, but he found himself helpless to arrest it. He embodies the doomed tradition of the Republican moderate, and his departure signifies its final extinction.
Romney sprang from political nobility. His father, George, served as president of American Motors, governor of Michigan, and for a time seemed likely to win the presidency. The elder Romney had fought for civil rights, created a state income tax, and doubled the state education budget in Michigan. These achievements made him the leader of his party’s then-formidable moderate wing. George grasped the extremism of the conservative movement and threw himself into the fight to arrest its takeover of the party. In 1964, he refused to endorse Barry Goldwater and wrote a scathing 12-page letter denouncing his extreme anti-statism and opposition to civil rights laws.
Romney’s defeat in 1968 seemed at the time to be a temporary factional setback but turned out to be an irreversible catastrophe. “In hindsight,” wrote Geoffrey Kabaservice, “Romney was the GOP moderates’ last and best chance to elect one of their own to the presidency, which in turn would have preserved the long-term viability of the moderate movement.”
Mitt inherited his father’s sensibility and many of his values. But without any kind of political base or intellectual infrastructure like his father enjoyed, he was reduced to half-measures, lurching away from the embrace of the conservative-dominated party but then rushing back into its fold. His ideas would evaporate like ice cubes on warm pavement.
Romney burst into politics in Massachusetts, running a slashing right-wing campaign in 1994 on the wave of the Gingrich revolution to defeat Ted Kennedy. In defeat, he swerved back to the center, won his state’s governorship, and designed an innovative new program to make health insurance available to every citizen in the Commonwealth.
In 2008, he ran for president, veering again to the right. He lost but performed well enough in the primary to almost immediately launch another campaign for the nomination four years later.
