VietNamNet would like to introduce a series of article about the presidential election in the US, by G. Calvin Mackenzie, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College in the USA and currently a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam.

In America, the presidential race takes shape



Who is Mitt Romney?

This is the question on a lot of minds these days—in America and among America watchers around the world.  Who is the man the Republicans will nominate as their candidate for President in what appears likely, at this time at least, to be a very close November election?

In most countries, the small group of people who are considered for national leadership are highly seasoned. They’ve been on the national stage for decades and have participated actively in debates over national policy.  They’ve proven their abilities to others in the national arena and honed their political instincts.  

But America doesn’t operate that way.  No one, no person or party elite, truly controls the process by which presidential candidates are nominated in America.  Not uncommonly, as a result, the party is “captured” by an outsider, a person with little or no experience in the national government—a stranger to the American people.

So it is in 2012.  Mitt Romney joins a long line of recent presidential nominees with no prior experience in the national government as they seek to become its leader: Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush.  Romney has been a public figure in America for more than a decade, though largely at the fringes of visibility.  These are the principal facts of his personal biography.  

He was born 65 years ago and raised in a prominent family in the state of Michigan.  His father was the CEO of an automobile company and then became governor of the state, an unsuccessful candidate for president in 1968, and a member of Richard Nixon’s cabinet.  Romney is an active member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, more commonly known as Mormons.  Like most young Mormon men he did missionary work abroad early in his adulthood.  This earned him a deferment from the military draft during the war with Vietnam and he has never served in the American armed forces.  He did, however, support the American war effort in Vietnam.

Romney graduated from Brigham Young University and earned law and business degrees from Harvard. He then started what became a very successful and very lucrative business career in Boston, Massachusetts.  He soon became CEO of Bain and Company, which he led to profitability from the brink of failure, then founded a spin-off company, Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm.  The success of Bain Capital earned Romney a great fortune, currently estimated at around $250 million.

In 1994, he took a leave from the company to try his hand in politics.  In Massachusetts, he won the Republican nomination to challenge the re-election of Senator Ted Kennedy, a Massachusetts political icon.

Massachusetts is one of the most liberal American states and it is dominated by the Democrats.  To win elections there, Republicans often have to take positions on issues that closely resemble the more liberal stances of their Democratic opponents and are different from the views that prevail among Republicans in other parts of the country.  So, for example, Romney in the 1994 campaign often indicated his support for a woman’s right to a legal abortion and for gun control measures that were anathema to most Republicans.  But even that was not enough to overcome the popularity of Kennedy, and he lost badly.

He left Bain in 1999 to serve as head of the organizing committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Here he earned a reputation as an effective executive, turning the troubled Olympics into profitability for the city.  He then began to plan a campaign for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, a campaign that he won.

Romney held that position for 4 years.  Working with a state legislature dominated by Democrats, he managed to eliminate the state’s budget deficit by cutting government spending and raising taxes.  He also initiated an innovative health care program that became a model for the program President Obama proposed and the Congress approved in 2010.

Romney chose not to seek a second term in Massachusetts and began instead to plan a run for the Republican nomination for president in 2008.  He competed vigorously in the state primaries that year, but ultimately lost the nomination to John McCain.  That, however, only interrupted his pursuit of the presidency.  After McCain’s defeat in the general election, Romney made it clear that he would be a candidate again in 2012.  And here he is, the likely Republican nominee.

But the question remains: who is this man the Republicans will choose, what does he believe, and what would he try to accomplish if elected president?  Those important questions will be the subject of the next column.

G. Calvin Mackenzie