Mitt's Mission

The answer came in a detour to a place where being Mormon wouldn't be a problem. In 1999, Romney accepted an invitation to move to Utah to take over planning for the 2002 Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. The Games were a mess after revelations that organizers had wooed members of the International Olympic Committee with high-priced bribes. The Games were supposed to be Utah's moment in the spotlight and Mormonism's chance to emerge from the fringes. Now they seemed only an opportunity to be embarrassed on an international stage. "I walked into the Olympic building," Romney recalls, "and people looked like somebody had just died."

Romney had to be a savior in a very public setting, and he thrilled to the chance. Recruiting new chief financial and chief operating officers, he immediately imposed cuts. Using the skills he'd learned at Bain to take companies apart and put them back together, Romney immersed himself in the tiniest details of the Games' management. Even fun was mandated: he decreed that every meeting would start with a joke. Three years of obsessing over details did the trick; the Games went off without incident and turned a $50 million profit. Romney was heralded as a hero in Utah, and many urged him to run for governor of the state.

Massachusetts Republicans, however, wanted another shot at Romney, a chance to see more in him than his faith. With the Olympics barely over, he returned East in 2002 and announced his candidacy for governor. He would not be Mitt the Mormon this time, but Mitt the turnaround specialist who could work his Salt Lake City magic to save Massachusetts from fiscal ruin. The Boston press bought it; it had already written the Mormon story. Romney solidly beat Democrat Shannon O'Brien and took control of the governor's office in January 2003.

Romney finally had his chance to fulfill his father's wish for him, to govern with principle, and his own wish for himself, to be his state's white knight. The problem was that the powers on Beacon Hill, where a Democratic legislature was entrenched, weren't convinced Massachusetts needed saving. By his own admission, Romney was best at throwing his energy at a single, looming threat. When asked about his greatest flaws, he says, "I'm not the most organized of managers. I tend to immediately concentrate on what I think is the most difficult problem." It was a strategy that served him well in business, where his subordinates could sweat the small stuff. But a governor had to be comfortable making tiny compromises to gain the opposition's trust. Romney recoiled from backroom dealmaking, and many legislators wrote him off as a prissy novice.

Apart from an innovative plan to provide universal health care, Romney's single term as governor was in many senses a disappointment. Unable to work with the Democrats, he instead chose the TV camera as a governing partner. When the state Supreme Court made Massachusetts the first state to allow same-sex couples to marry, Romney rose in passionate opposition and became the most prominent, and telegenic, gay-marriage critic in the country. Around the same time, he revised his views on abortion, saying he was now not only personally opposed to abortion, but favored overturning Roe v. Wade. When he announced his candidacy for the presidency, shortly after leaving the governor's office in January 2007, he had reinvented himself as a social conservative ready to take on a moderate GOP field. Conversions of convenience were frowned upon in young Mitt's upbringing, but the adult Romney seemed untroubled.

The Mormon question loomed larger than any other over Romney's young campaign. As governor, he had demonstrated he was not interested in imposing the doctrines of his faith on the people of Massachusetts. (For example, he signed a law abolishing the state's centuries-old "blue laws," prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays. "I could serve alcohol in the White House," he says.) But evangelical Republican primary voters, many of whom view Mormonism as a heretical cult, were a major concern. In the months leading up to his announcement, Romney met privately with conservative Christian leaders to highlight his positions on social issues. At a meeting with 15 top evangelical leaders in Belmont in October 2006, he stressed commonalities between Mormons and other Christians. Most important was a single phrase: "I accept Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior"—a phrase that backfired in certain quarters. Although it is a true representation of Romney's beliefs, some conservative evangelicals were offended that he appeared to be co-opting their language for political gain.