Romney is shielding himself from the charge that he’s a hidden centrist. Mitt Romney in Mass.: The lost years

Michael Dukakis wouldn’t stop talking about the “Massachusetts Miracle” during the 1988 campaign.

These days, it’s a minor miracle when the word “Massachusetts” passes from Mitt Romney’s lips for more than a fleeting moment — and the presumptive GOP nominee seldom expounds on his four highly consequential years as a moderate Republican lording over an unruly pack of Bay State liberals.


By choosing to emphasize his experience as a can-do businessman who ran the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and Bain Capital, Romney is shielding himself from the charge that he’s a hidden centrist who passed the nation’s most sweeping local health care reform bill, supported abortion rights and closed tax loopholes for the rich.

( Also on POLITICO: Simon says businessmen make lousy presidents)

President Barack Obama’s campaign, for its part, is happy to hammer Romney for job losses at companies acquired by Bain — and to mock him for dodging what they cast as a lousy record as governor.

The result is one of the oddest political storylines in an oddball year. No candidate in modern history has so aggressively undersold what has been seen as the most desirable qualification for the presidency since the 1970s — running a state — nor downplayed a string of victories, tough calls and man-up moments that a typical politician would highlight in a heartbeat. Massachusetts, it seems, doesn’t pass Romney’s risk-vs.-reward test.

“I think it’s weird for him to talk about what he wants to do in government and not make reference to what he actually did in government, ” said Democrat Deval Patrick, the Bay State’s current governor, in a phone interview with POLITICO.

“He did one profoundly important thing, and nobody can take it away from him, and that’s health care reform — and he doesn’t want to talk about that,” added Patrick, who is close to Obama. “The impression he left with people here was he was more interested in having the job [of governor] than doing the job.”

In April, the Obama campaign released a video “congratulating” Romney on the sixth anniversary of the passage of the Massachusetts health law, which the governor touted as a “national model” at the time.

“On the campaign trail, what you say in one town can show up in the next. People have him recorded as promoting Massachusetts health reform, promoting it as a national model. And now he is saying he wants to tear down the very model that he was promoting,” John McDonough, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and a health care adviser on both the Massachusetts and Obama bills, said in the video.

The Romney campaign is clearly sensitive to such an attack — and it's not like he shuns mention of his old job altogether: His education speech Wednesday, for instance, leaned heavily on reforms he proposed in the Bay State.

“Gov. Romney is proud of his record and his leadership experience in both the private and public sectors,” said campaign spokesman Ryan Williams, a veteran of Romney’s gubernatorial days.

But when he references Massachusetts, he tends to do so in passing and almost never during the campaign moments that really matter, Democrats say.

His standard stump speech during the primaries focused on his childhood vacations in the family Rambler, his father’s hardscrabble childhood in Mexico and dozens of attacks on Obama’s record.

When he talked about his moderate record in deep-blue Massachusetts, hardly a vote-grabber in GOP primaries in any event, it was to illustrate his distance from it. He governed Massachusetts, but “I like to joke that I didn’t inhale,” he said over and over during the primary season.

“It is kind of interesting that the four years he was here are kind of gone from the résumé, isn’t it?” said Ronald Mariano, the Democratic majority leader of the Massachusetts House of Representatives. “It’s amazing. If you were a recruiter or a human resources person, the first thing you ask is, ‘What are the gaps in the résumé?’ Well, with Romney, Massachusetts is that gap.”

Romney’s advisers say he has no problem talking about his record in Massachusetts or even making their case for “Romneycare” — it’s a state program, not a national mandate, they have argued exhaustively.

At this year’s meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney touted the “19 tax cuts” he put in place as governor and his “unique experience of defending our conservative principles in the most liberal state in our union.”

His staff, at least the handful of loyalists who have been with him since the State House, enjoy recounting how he locked horns with a rogues’ gallery of corrupt, colorful Democrats. There was, for instance, his war to unseat Billy Bulger — a Democratic kingmaker whose brother was mob boss James “Whitey” Bulger — from the presidency of the University of Massachusetts.

“I thought Romney was very strong in his position — and he was right,” former state Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, a Democrat, told the Los Angeles Times last June, when federal agents captured Whitey Bulger after 19 alleged murders and 16 years on the lam.

An even more dramatic anecdote the campaign isn’t using: In 2006, Romney took on Matthew Amorello, head of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, after a 38-year-old mother of three was killed by a falling concrete panel installed as part of Boston’s scandal-plagued “Big Dig.” When Amorello failed to show up to a meeting to discuss the agency’s response to the accident, an incensed Romney charged up to him — in front of news cameras — grabbed Amorello and asked incredulously, “You’re too big for the governor?” according to “The Real Romney,” a biography compiled by Boston Globe reporters.

Romney later forced Amorello out of office — and convinced the state Legislature to give him emergency powers to finish the project. “Immediately, Romney became a commanding and reassuring presence,” the authors reported.

Yet that battle, like a half-dozen other memorable fights, is seldom mentioned on the stump and has been absent from ads run by the campaign or the pro-Romney Super PAC Restore Our Future.

Romney’s advisers say the time for talking about Massachusetts was four years ago, when he was a relative unknown on the national stage trying to establish a reputation. Voters, they say, know all about his government service now, so it makes sense to weave it into a broader leadership package that encompasses Massachusetts, Bain and the Olympics.

If Bain and the Olympics get top billing, a senior campaign adviser told POLITICO, it’s because Romney wants to differentiate himself from his opponents.

“We are happy to compare Mitt Romney’s career as a successful businessman and a fiscally responsible governor with President Obama’s failed economic agenda and liberal policies,” Williams said. "Obama and [Vice President Joe] Biden are both career politicians who have never had any meaningful experience in the private sector. This president is an economic lightweight who doesn’t understand how the economy works and continues to propose more of the same taxes, spending and regulations that are killing jobs.”

Democrats, including Patrick, say such claims should be measured against what they claim is Romney’s subpar performance in Massachusetts.

“He doesn’t talk about his time as governor because it doesn’t tell the story he is selling,” Patrick said. “We were 47th in job creation. … I don’t think he’s a bad guy, and he’s always been good to me, … but the whole host of reforms folks have talked about for decades — he didn’t get ’em done, we got ’em done.

“Mr. Fix It didn’t fix it.”

While Bain is the focus now, Democrats say they are likely to bring up Massachusetts more and more as the campaign rolls on, focusing on the state’s anemic job growth during Romney’s term, led by a big decline in industrial employment, an increase in the state’s long-term debt load under his stewardship and a $750 million increase in taxes and fees on state residents, revenue enhancements that prompted the conservative Cato Institute in 2006 to label Romney’s no-tax hikes pledge “mostly a myth.”

At his NATO press conference in Chicago this week, Obama said attacks on Bain are fair game precisely because that’s where Romney is focusing his pitch.

“His main calling card for why he thinks he should be president is his business expertise,” Obama said. “He is not going out there touting his experience in Massachusetts. He is saying, ‘I’m a business guy and I know how to fix it,’ and this is his business.”

Republicans say they would love to debate Romney’s record as governor — because he has a better track record than Obama of stimulating job growth without massive new public spending.

“Governor Romney is running as someone whose experience as a successful governor is an important asset as he makes his case for fixing the American economy and putting the country back on track,” longtime Romney adviser Kevin Madden said in an email.

“By pointing to the fact that, as a successful governor, he came into office and wiped away a massive budget deficit while instituting government reforms, he can offer the American people an idea of the type [of] reforms and fiscal conservatism he would bring to Washington.”