Romney speaks up

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the GOP’s hot new political star, doesn’t like what his state’s Sen. John Kerry stands for — and he wants everyone to know it.

He doesn’t personally dislike Mr. Kerry: “I find him to be a personable fellow,” Mr. Romney told me in a recent interview. But Mr. Kerry is too liberal, he says, as is his boyish-looking running mate, John Edwards. Mr. Romney says the North Carolina freshman senator is too inexperienced to be vice president — let alone only an incident away from the presidency.

The governor is a former venture capitalist investor who funded some of the biggest job-producing corporations in America, saved the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics from bankruptcy and now runs one of the most liberal states in the country. Mr. Romney dismisses Mr. Edwards as a lightweight who lacks the management credentials to lead the most powerful nation on Earth.

Mr. Edwards, Mr. Romney says, has never run anything and has won only one election in his life, his current Senate term. Before that, he was “a pretty glib” trial lawyer who lacked the experience for this job. As for their politics, “both Kerry and his running mate are from the far left wing of the Democratic Party,” putting them outside the nation’s political mainstream.

Mr. Romney’s political attacks have not only delighted Republican leaders, they have catapulted him into the national spotlight. Why? Because it’s one thing for President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney or other Republican leaders to make these charges, but when they come from the governor of Mr. Kerry’s state, they have a big impact.

The telegenic governor, a devout member of the Latter-day Saints (“Mormon”) Church, whose job approval ratings are in the upper 50s, says he wants to “do anything I can to help” re-elect the president and is ready to campaign for him around the country. But it’s also no secret he has presidential ambitions of his own and is said to be preparing a White House bid for 2008.

Mr. Romney, first and foremost, is a fiscal conservative who has held the line on taxes and spending at a time when many governors were raising both. He is liberal on some social issues, saying he personally opposes abortion but has pledged “not to change the law in any way with respect to choice.”

He burst upon the national political scene earlier this year by leading the charge against same-sex “marriage” after a Massachusetts court ruled the state’s refusal to grant “marriage” licenses to homosexual couples violated the equal protection provisions of the state constitution.

“[Romney] has distinguished himself on the same-sex marriage issue,” says social conservative leader Paul Weyrich. “I know a lot of people in the pro-family community in Massachusetts who are very pleased with him and think he has done a lot for the pro-family movement.”

Social conservatives also like his squeaky-clean moral image. “He has talked about the necessity of honesty and integrity in government, and that resonates right now because people feel they do not know who to trust,” Mr. Weyrich told me. “That’s going to help him nationwide as well.”

Stephen Moore, president of conservative advocacy group Club for Growth, says Mr. Romney “ranks as one of the five most fiscally conservative governors in America.”

“I see Romney as a rising star in the Republican Party,” Mr. Moore added. “He is one of the five or six leading contenders for the Republican nomination in 2008.”

When I asked him about his presidential ambitions, Mr. Romney said this is “the furthest thing from my mind. I’m fully consumed with the job I’ve got and with the effort to re-elect the current president.”

But while recently traveling to his native Michigan to open the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters, he addressed a group of Republican conservatives in Orange County, Calif., and has begun campaigning for Republican candidates around the country.

He spoke to the National Press Club yesterday about terrorism, and has a new book coming out about how he secured the Winter Olympics in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

His friends say he is focused on re-election to a second term in 2006, but afterward has his sights set for higher office. And strategists in both parties believe that is what he’ll do.

“He’s playing it in a very careful and calculating way to make himself attractive, both to the socially conservative wing of the Republican Party as well as to the tax-cutting wing of the party,” says Boston business executive Steve Grossman, former Democratic National Committee chairman under Bill Clinton.

“The impression is that he’s doing pretty well in Massachusetts at the moment,” Mr. Grossman told me. “His poll numbers are good. He has political muscle.”

Right now, Mr. Weyrich thinks “it would be a stretch for Republicans to nominate someone from Massachusetts,” but Mr. Romney may prove such doubters wrong.

Donald Lambro, chief political correspondent of The Washington Times, is a nationally syndicated columnist.