Mitt Romney’s War With the Boston Globe
Mitt Romney’s War With the Boston Globe
IT WASN’T ALWAYS like this between Mitt Romney and the press. His aides didn’t always tell reporters to “kiss my ass”; they didn’t always hole him up in a Mittness Protection Program, the not-so-affectionate name campaign journalists have given to the candidate’s extreme lack of availability. And they sure didn’t drive sympathetic journalists—in this case, Fox News’s Greta van Susteren—to suggest that the experience of covering him is like being a member of a “petting zoo.” It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time, nearly 20 years ago, when Romney’s electoral strategy largely hinged on wooing the press, on proving to them that he was a less adversarial kind of Republican candidate. That he wasn’t able to has shaped his political life ever since.
In the winter of 1993, Romney invited Frank Phillips, head of the statehouse bureau of The Boston Globe, and Scot Lehigh, his frequent collaborator, to lunch. To Phillips, who’d been covering local races for decades and knew every local pol, the name didn’t ring a bell. He’d heard of George Romney, of course, and chuckled at the idea that somebody would even be named “Mitt.” But Romney, poised to confront Ted Kennedy in the next year’s Senate election, was bringing a fourth person to lunch: Charley Manning, a white-haired, well-liked Republican consultant in town. Manning’s hire signaled to Phillips that Romney was serious. He accepted the invitation.
At the Parker House, a creaky old institution where the Boston cream pie had been invented, Phillips got his first look at the 46-year-old Romney, a slighter version of the 2012 model, but with the same stiff helmet of hair. Phillips was immediately impressed. “He was loose and unscripted,” Phillips says. “He actually seemed a little nervous. I got the sense that maybe he saw us as the gatekeepers of his political future.”
Matt Storin, who had been named editor of the Globe in 1993, was another recipient of Romney’s charm offensive. Over lunch at The Palm in the Back Bay, Storin came to believe that, unlike the typical Massachusetts Republican who loved to bash the paper, Romney saw it as a potential asset in his race against Kennedy. “I’ve been studying the data,” Romney told Storin. “The Globe is important. The people who vote in this state are the people who read the Globe.” The implication was clear, Storin says: “He wanted to make nice.”