BOSTON — When Gov. Mitt Romney signed legislation in April 2006 requiring most Massachusetts residents to have health coverage, Sen. Edward Kennedy stood by his side. They were on stage at historic Faneuil Hall in Boston, a setting that had a special resonance for the two.
Twelve years earlier, they had shared that stage as opponents in a bitter Senate race. Back then, Romney accused Kennedy of waging “untrue, unfair and sleazy” personal attacks. Now, the Republican governor was introducing the liberal Democratic senator as “my collaborator and friend.”
Romney’s complicated relationship with Kennedy - from campaign foe to healthcare partner - helped shape both his political career and his image. Today, as a Republican candidate for president, he is courting conservative voters, a constituency that does not look kindly upon Kennedy or the Romney approach to health care, which will come under fresh scrutiny this week when the Supreme Court takes up challenges to a similar measure championed by President Barack Obama.
But try as he might to distance himself, Romney cannot escape Kennedy’s influence. On the campaign trail, he uses the senator, who died in 2009, as a foil, denouncing Kennedy’s “liberal welfare state” policies and boasting of how Kennedy “had to take out a mortgage on his house to make sure he could defeat me.”
He has said losing to Kennedy was “the best thing” that could have happened to him, “because it put me back in the private sector.”
Romney’s attempt in 1994 to “out-Kennedy Kennedy,” as people in Massachusetts say, led him to take stands on issues such as abortion and gay rights that he has since backed away from, giving rise to accusations that he is a flip-flopper. Kennedy’s tough campaign advertisements, which portrayed Romney as a cold hearted financier, rattled him, and his loss in the race “viscerally pained” him, one friend said.
But he emerged tougher, convinced that it is better to punch first than to counter punch later - lessons his campaign is putting to use today.
“Romney was the young up-and-comer in ’94, who thought that the aging champ had lost his edge and was then surprised to get knocked out,” said Rob Gray, a Republican strategist who advised Romney in his 2002 race for governor. “That certainly caused him to reassess how any future campaign should be built.”
The two men could not have been more different.Kennedy was the back-slapping Irish pol with the rakish past; Romney the upstanding, if stiff, businessman who viewed Kennedy with some disdain. While they eventually joined forces, theirs was a transactional relationship. Despite Romney’s glowing Faneuil Hall introduction, they never truly became friends.
“I just don’t think they spoke the same language,” said Scott Ferson, a former Kennedy aide and Romney neighbor who became a bridge between the two.
They did extend courtesies to each other. Kennedy lent his support to construction of a Mormon temple in Belmont, Mass., a project just minutes from Romney’s home and dear to him. Later, as governor, Romney turned up during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston for the dedication of a ribbon of parks named for Kennedy’s mother, Rose.
But it was their work on health care, a lifelong passion for Kennedy, that may have had the most enduring impact on Romney. The legislation gave him national standing to run for president in 2008, only to emerge as a political liability in the current campaign in a way that neither man could have foreseen.
The 1994 race gave Romney, a political novice, his first chance to explain his views to voters. As a Republican in liberal Massachusetts, he had little choice but to run on a socially moderate platform. But Todd Domke, a Republican strategist in Boston, believes that Romney’s advisers were too willing “to package him” as a proponent of abortion rights and gay rights. (Romney’s chief strategists in 1994, Charley Manning and Robert Marsh, did not respond to messages seeking comment.)
“He has paid the price ever since,” Domke said.
By September 1994, with Kennedy tied up in Washington working on President Bill Clinton’s health-care bill, polls were showing a tight race. Alarmed, the Kennedy campaign sent a video crew to Indiana to interview factory workers who had been laid off by Ampad, a paper-products company that had been acquired by Bain Capital.
The resulting advertisements featuring hard-up, angry workers sent Romney’s ratings, and his confidence, sliding.
Those spots are still having an effect on Romney today. “They seeded the public perception of him as a takeover artist who made his money stripping companies and firing people,” said Robert Shrum, the Kennedy strategist who produced them.
Kennedy’s strong debate performance in late October in Faneuil Hall also caught Romney off guard. On Election Day, Romney lost, 58 percent to 41 percent.
Romney did not make health care a cause when he ran for governor in 2002. But by fall 2004, changing circumstances in Washington pushed him into it - and into a partnership with Kennedy.
In 1997, the senator had negotiated a deal with the federal government that gave Massachusetts a waiver in administering its state Medicaid program, including extra money for hospitals that cared for the poor. But the waiver was set to expire, and the administration of President George W. Bush, who was then in office, wanted to cut off the money, depriving the state of $385 million a year.
As a Republican governor, Romney could have made his case by himself to the Republican administration in Washington. But Kennedy had pull in Washington, and was close to Tommy Thompson, the Bush health secretary. The senator’s involvement gave Romney “political cover,” said John McDonough, a professor of public health at Harvard who then ran a health-care advocacy group.
In January 2005, on Thompson’s last day as health secretary, the two men persuaded him to let Massachusetts keep the money - so long as the state used it to cover the uninsured, and passed a bill within a year.
For Kennedy, the agreement seemed a path to universal care; if Massachusetts passed a bill, he reasoned, it might serve as a template for national legislation. Romney, though, viewed health care as a fiscal, not moral, concern. He saw a financing system that was “opaque and creaky,” said Tim Murphy, his former health secretary, and thought he could do better.
But with Democrats in control of the state Legislature, Romney had little hope of passing a bill on his own. Kennedy worked lawmakers behind the scenes, writing notes, cajoling, making telephone calls and stepping in when negotiations between House and Senate Democrats broke down.
Kennedy’s style seemed to rub off, if only a little. Early one Sunday morning, when the bill seemed in danger, Romney showed up unannounced at the homes of Travaligni and Salvatore DiMasi, the House speaker, to urge them to push the talks forward.
For both the senator and the governor, the health bill was a crowning achievement. Yet today, as Romney struggles to defend the Massachusetts law while arguing that he would repeal the federal one, he is not eager to talk about his partnership with Kennedy. Last fall, at a debate in his home state, Michigan, he was asked about it.
“Thanks,” Romney said wryly, “for reminding everybody.”
Front Section, Pages 11 on 03/25/2012