Romney Takes Liberties With Claims About a Bipartisan Past

When Mitt Romney accused President Obama in their debate Wednesday night of refusing to work with Republicans, he held up his own record as the Massachusetts governor as an example of what political cooperation can achieve.

As a Republican governor whose legislature was 87 percent Democrats, he said, “I figured out from Day 1 I had to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done.” The result, he said, was that “we drove our schools to be No. 1 in the nation. We cut taxes 19 times.”

Mr. Romney and the legislature did at times get along, Massachusetts schools were often top-rated, and some taxes did drop during Mr. Romney’s four years as governor, from 2003 through 2006. But a comparison of his claims to the factual record suggests that all three take liberties with the truth.

While the governor and the legislature came together to produce balanced budgets and enact a signature health care reform bill, much of those four years were characterized by conflict and tensions. In the opening months of his tenure, Mr. Romney vetoed a Massachusetts House plan to create new committees and raise staff members’ pay, and the legislators rejected his flagship proposal, a nearly 600-page plan to overhaul the state bureaucracy.

Mr. Romney proved to have a taste for vetoes, killing legislative initiatives in his first two years at more than twice the rate of his more popular Republican predecessor, William F. Weld, The Boston Globe reported in 2004. The lawmakers responded in kind by overriding his vetoes at a rapid pace.

By 2004, the second year of his term, Mr. Romney was provoked enough to mount an unprecedented campaign to unseat Democratic legislators, spending $3 million in Republican party money and hiring a nationally known political strategist, Michael Murphy.

The effort failed spectacularly. Republicans lost seats, leaving them with their smallest legislative delegation since 1867. Democratic legislators were reported at the time to have been deeply angered by the campaign’s tactics.

“They had a deteriorating relationship during the first two years,” Jeffrey Berry, a political science professor and expert on state politics at Tufts University, said in an interview. The campaign “was designed to demonstrate that he could make life difficult for them if he chose to do so. It did not endear him to them.”

Mr. Romney quickly initiated a charm offensive, inviting Democratic leaders to dinners at his home for the first time since taking office two years earlier. But the legislators were soon “infuriated,” Mr. Berry said, when Mr. Romney, testing the presidential waters, began traveling outside the state and casting brickbats at Massachusetts’s traditionally liberal values before crowds of potential supporters.

On education, Mr. Romney was factually correct in stating that Massachusetts students were ranked first in the nation during his tenure. Massachusetts students in grades four and eight took top honors or tied for first in reading and mathematics on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal Department of Education test often called the nation’s report card.

However, educators largely agree that the state’s rise to first place was a result of a wholesale reform of state schools enacted 10 years earlier under Governor Weld. The reforms, carried out over eight years, doubled state spending on schools and brought standards and accountability to both administrators and students.

“Governor Romney does not get to take the credit for achieving that No. 1 ranking,” said Mike Gilbert, the field director for the nonprofit Massachusetts Association of School Committees, “but it did happen while he was in office.”

Under Mr. Romney, neither the governor nor the legislature enjoyed notable successes in education, although Mr. Romney is credited with battling successfully against efforts to dismantle some of the 1993 reforms.

Mr. Romney and the legislature cut deeply into state grants to local governments in 2003 amid a state budget crisis, forcing many school districts to raise property taxes. In 2006, Mr Romney vetoed a bill passed unanimously by the legislature that established standards for preschool education and set long-term plans to make it universal. He said the programs would cost too much at a time of budget austerity.

Mr. Romney’s claim that he was responsible for 19 separate tax cuts is also technically accurate. But here, too, the complete story paints a very different picture.

Perhaps the most substantial tax reduction occurred in 2005, when Mr. Romney’s administration wrote legislation refunding $250 million in capital gains taxes to 145,000 investors. But the legislation carried out a court ruling finding that the taxes had been illegally withheld in 2002; the court gave the state the option of refunding the taxes or rewriting the law to correct the illegality.

Mr Romney proposed the latter, and the legislature agreed.

Of the remaining 18 tax cuts, many were proposed by the legislature, not Mr. Romney, and others were routine extensions of existing tax reductions that were due to expire. One was a change in the Massachusetts tax code to make it conform to changes in the federal code. Two were one-day sales-tax holidays.

Mr. Romney’s critics note that his administration was also responsible for revenue-raising measures which, under that loose definition, might well be called tax increases. In his first year, Mr. Romney closed business tax loopholes and increased fees on an array of services, from marriage licenses to home purchases.

“Our numbers on revenue are that he raised about $750 million annually — $375 million from fees and $375 million from corporate taxes,” said Michael Widmer, president of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

In 2004, Mr. Romney signed legislation allowing local officials to collect an additional $100 million in commercial property taxes from businesses.

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Clinton Was a Bipartisan President, Except When He Wasn't

Damon Winter/The New York TimesFormer President Bill Clinton was greeted with an extended standing ovation at the Democratic convention on Wednesday.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Perhaps only Bill Clinton could deliver one of the most brutal partisan poundings of the other party in recent memory and come out of it with people talking about how bipartisan he is.

For 48 minutes on Wednesday night, he extolled the virtues of working with Republicans, then eviscerated them as dangerous radicals. He offered more abundant praise of George W. Bush than most prime-time speakers at the Republican convention, then said he had left President Obama “a total mess.”

“It was a pretty bipartisan speech relative to a convention,” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and Vermont governor, said on CBS News on Thursday morning.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, another former party chairman, pointed out the caveat. “It was bipartisan,” he said. “It was a little bit like giving someone flowers at the same time you’re taking a scalpel and dissecting them.”

In that sense, the speech was a vivid reminder of Mr. Clinton’s famed capacity for juggling many different ideas, personas and narratives, and along the way rewriting the history of his own presidency. The story line of a relatively bipartisan era when Democrats and Republicans came together to overhaul welfare, balance the budget and expand the economy profoundly oversimplifies a much more complicated, messier presidency.

As it happens, the revised version of history is something of a bipartisan conspiracy. As much as Mr. Clinton wants to emphasize those elements of his record, so now do Republicans, as a way of contrasting the popular Mr. Clinton with the not-so-popular Mr. Obama. They have praised Mr. Clinton as a bipartisan centrist, as opposed to the leftist Mr. Obama.

“Bill Clinton was a different kind of Democrat than Barack Obama,” Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, told CNN before the former president’s speech. “Bill Clinton gave us welfare reform. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to cut spending. Bill Clinton did not play the kind of political games that President Obama’s playing.”

After the speech, Mitt Romney’s campaign pressed home that theme. “President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight,” said Ryan Williams, a campaign spokesman. “Bill Clinton worked with Republicans, balanced the budget and after four years he could say you were better off. Barack Obama hasn’t worked across the aisle.”

It is certainly true that Mr. Clinton in his instincts and messaging was more centrist than Mr. Obama, and the 42nd president emerged from the White House with a string of achievements that both parties laid claim to. But to say that Mr. Clinton worked together with Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans on welfare, spending, trade and other issues is an exercise in selective amnesia.

Mr. Clinton’s first major budget plan passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Once Mr. Gingrich’s party took over Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, the two men clashed over spending so fiercely that the government was shut down. The two sides eventually drafted a plan to balance the budget, but it was made considerably easier by an economy that was growing so fast that few genuinely hard choices had to be made – and in fact the budget became balanced years before it was envisioned because of unexpectedly strong tax revenues.

Likewise, many talk today about how Mr. Clinton and Republicans worked together on overhauling welfare. Not exactly. Mr. Clinton had long supported limiting the number of years that recipients could receive benefits, requiring work in many instances and providing child care, training and other assistance to make that possible.

But he strongly opposed Mr. Gingrich’s more conservative vision of welfare and twice vetoed Republican proposals before bowing to the political winds in an election year and signing a third, somewhat modified version. Even then, he spoke out against limits on benefits to legal immigrants and promised to overhaul the overhaul.

By the time he appeared at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte on Wednesday night, Mr. Clinton was grayer and memories fuzzier. The fights of his generation have faded with time, and the accomplishments have been accordioned into simple sentences. At some points it even seemed that Mr. Clinton had forgotten some of the harshest moments of his own time in the White House.

“Though I often disagree with Republicans,” he said, “I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.”

This from the man who was hated so much by Republicans that they impeached him for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky – and who loathed a number of his enemies back.

But Mr. Clinton, more than most politicians, has always been able to reimagine himself and his place in America, and he has a knack for eventually reconciling with those he battled against.

He beat the elder George Bush in 1992, then once out of office became such good friends with him that they hang out in the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Me. He beat Bob Dole for re-election in 1996, then bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom. He campaigned against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 but now travels the country with him giving joint speeches.

He even broke bread at points with conservative figures like Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Ruddy who were among his biggest antagonists in the 1990s. (The one exception has always been Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated his attempts to cover up his affair with Ms. Lewinsky in a sexual harassment lawsuit. “That’s another kettle of fish,” he once said.)

In any case, Mr. Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night was seen as a template for Mr. Obama, an example of how to run in a difficult year. “Cooperation works better,” Mr. Clinton said and noted the various Republicans Mr. Obama had appointed. But he went on to say that Republican plans “will hurt poor kids,” explode the debt, “force seniors to pay more for drugs,” cut taxes for millionaires and raise them for the middle class.

“They want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place,” he said. Then he appropriated the Republicans’ greatest recent hero, Ronald Reagan. “As another president once said, there they go again.”

The truth is that party conventions and election campaigns are partisan affairs. If Mr. Clinton provided any lesson for the current president on Wednesday, it might not be in how to be bipartisan, but how to be partisan and win while not looking like it.

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Partisanship Is Not a Bipartisan Problem

Swikar Patel/The Journal-Gazette, via Associated PressIndiana G.O.P. U.S. Senate nominee Richard E. Mourdock on Wednesday, May 9, 2012.

In my post yesterday on Tuesday’s voting, I mentioned that Richard Lugar lost the Indiana Senate primary to Richard Mourdock, a radical right-winger. I didn’t have time to write at length about his thoughtful farewell letter, but it’s worth revisiting as a sort of treatise on the state of politics.

Mr. Lugar has built himself a reputation as a moderate, at least when it comes to matters of foreign policy. Generally speaking he was not a rebel in the Republican caucus on domestic issues, though he did vote for the auto industry bailout and for Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagen.

Mr. Mourdock, for his part, described bipartisanship as follows: “I have a mind-set that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”

It’s impossible to say for sure why primary voters favored Mr. Mourdock over Mr. Lugar. In his letter, Mr. Lugar suggested that the primary was a repudiation of bipartisanship and common sense. That seems less likely than the possibility that voters were simply tired of their current senator, who has served in Washington longer than many of them have been alive.

But Mr. Lugar was right that in his place, voters picked a radical who aims to remove any vestiges of moderation from the Republican Party. Mr. Mourdock recently compared the debate over tax reform to the divisions that led to Southern secession and the Civil War.

Mr. Lugar said Mr. Mourdock stood for “reflexive votes or a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party. His answer to the inevitable roadblocks he will encounter in Congress is merely to campaign for more Republicans who embrace the same partisan outlook. He has pledged his support to groups whose prime mission is to cleanse the Republican party of those who stray from orthodoxy as they see it.”

That’s a chillingly accurate description of modern-day Republicans. The party has been moving steadily rightward for decades, and has managed to silence or drive out Republican members of Congress who show the slightest tendency toward centrism – like Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, who is not running for re-election.

I take issue, however, with the fact that Mr. Lugar laid the blame for dysfunction in Washington equally on the Democrats and the Republicans. “Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country,” Mr. Lugar said.

There is plenty wrong with the Democratic Party, but monolithic adherence to liberal orthodoxy is not one of them. On the contrary the old Will Rogers joke “I belong to no organized party. I am a Democrat,” still resonates. Just for example, thirty-four House Democrats voted against the Democratic president’s signature health care legislation. The far left is not dominating the political debate in the slightest; it hardly has a voice at all. What passes as American liberalism today is awfully similar to the Republican platform of the Eisenhower area (something Rachel Maddow has noted.)

As Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a much-discussed Op-Ed for the Washington Post, “the Republicans are the problem.” Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, famously said his party’s “number one goal” was to keep Mr. Obama from winning a second term.  Yet Mr. Mann and Mr. Ornstein trace the roots of blind partisanship much farther back – to Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.

Mr. Gingrich had a single-minded devotion to attaining a Republican majority in the House by “convincing voters that the institution was so corrupt that anyone would be better than the incumbents, especially those in the Democratic majority.” Mr. Norquist created the “no-tax pledge,” which precludes any sane discussion of how to achieve deficit reduction, and which has inspired copy-cat pledges “on issues such as climate change, that create additional litmus tests that box in moderates and make cross-party coalitions nearly impossible.”

For a vivid illustration of what Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Norquist have wrought, one need look no farther than this year’s Republican presidential primaries. Voters jumped from one wild-eyed right winger after another, until they settled on Mitt Romney, who has abandoned his career as a moderate to remake himself in his party’s image.

This blog post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 10, 2012

This post originally stated that Mr. Lugar voted for the stimulus. Actually, he voted against the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. But he did vote for the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

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