BOSTON -- A Republican can be elected governor of the bluest state. Indeed, Republicans have held the statehouse here since Michael Dukakis' last year, 1990. Mitt Romney is the inexplicably happy holder of it now. What kind of person is preternaturally cheerful while governing with a Legislature in which 34 of 40 senators and 139 of 160 House members are Democrats?
``My vetoes count for nothing,'' he says cheerfully. But, then, he seems to relish heavy political lifting, as in his 1994 race against Sen. Ted Kennedy, which was Kennedy's closest race (58-41) since his initial election in 1962. Politics, says Romney, 57, is ``kind of like sport for old guys.'' In Massachusetts, ``I'm not supposed to win, but occasionally when the puck goes into the net you feel pretty good.'' He has done, or facilitated the doing of, some fine things, such as scrapping the Clean Elections Act, the Massachusetts mishmash of public funding and limits on political contributing and spending that was, Romney says, ``designed to protect incumbency in the most extreme manner.''
Willard Mitt Romney (his first name honors his father's friend, J. Willard Marriott, the hotelier) is the son of a presidential candidate, George Romney, Michigan's governor, 1963-69. His 1968 presidential campaign fizzled early, but President Nixon made him secretary of housing and urban development.
Mitt, born in 1947, is a devout Mormon who attended Brigham Young University, then did the four-year program that earns both business and law degrees at Harvard. He graduated cum laude from the law school and in the top 5 percent of his business school class that included a future president's son given to wearing a Texas Air National Guard flight jacket.
As a venture capitalist, Romney earned a fortune helping build such companies as Staples and Domino's Pizza. In 2002, he rescued the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from scandal and financial mismanagement and later that year was elected governor, facing a $3 billion gap in a $22 billion budget. By July 2004 there was a more than $700 million surplus, achieved without tax increases. Thanks partly to a 2000 referendum that cut the state income tax from 5.95 percent to 5.3 percent, Massachusetts now ranks 14th among the states for the lowest state and local tax burden.