re: #5 jaunte

I noted last week that in the American Conservative magazine that Ron Unz delved in cultural superiority, using a resource normally exploited by “racial realists” to argue that culture is what determines which nations are rich.

What some may not know is that Unz takes credit for making Romney governor of MA:

How I Made Mitt

With Mitt Romney now the de facto Republican presidential nominee, I sometimes recall how I inadvertently launched his political career a decade ago, which is less implausible than it might sound.

[…]

This prestigious success led Romney to make another stab at winning political office, and he entered the 2002 Republican primary for Massachusetts governor. Since I was then running an “English for the Children of Massachusetts” ballot-initiative campaign to dismantle bilingual education, I closely followed the political developments of that year.

[…]

Only 15 percent of registered Massachusetts voters were Republican, so the party’s talent pool was minuscule, and [Romney] selected Kerry Healey—a somewhat obscure local GOP activist who had never held political office—persuading her to enter the primary for the second [lieutenant] slot.

She was quickly challenged by Jim Rappaport, a wealthy Republican leader who hoped to win the primary by running sharply to her right. Thus, although Romney was unopposed for the Republican nomination, there ensued a bitter battle for the second slot between the Rappaport forces and the Romney forces, backing Healey.

At this point, my own campaign entered the equation. I had successfully qualified our measure as Question Two [English Only] for the November ballot, and its requirement that all immigrant children be taught English as soon as they started school had begun attracting heavy coverage in the local media, proving to be wildly popular among more conservative voters. Nonetheless, the vast majority of the state’s Democratic political establishment declared their opposition to the measure. Since Romney was positioning himself for the general election, he soon did the same.

Romney’s opposition concerned me, since unified Democratic and Republican attacks on our initiative might endanger its passage in November. Therefore, I quickly reached out to Rappaport, and with “English” having perhaps 90 percent support among Republicans, he immediately endorsed our Question Two, hoping to use the issue as a weapon against Healey in the primary.

Just as I had hoped, Romney soon decided that Healey needed to protect herself by also endorsing the [English Only] measure, which forced him to avoid an embarrassing split in the ranks by reversing his previous position and doing the same. Partly as a result, Healey soon won an overwhelming victory in her primary race, and the political lines were set for November.

[…]

As the election grew near, however, the hot-button question of whether or not all public schools should teach their students English exploded into public awareness, becoming far and away the biggest issue of the election, without a single dollar of advertising having been spent on its behalf. When reporters from the Globe and other newspapers went out and interviewed ordinary voters, many of them didn’t much know or care about the candidates running for any office, including governor, but almost everyone was talking about “English” and most were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Finally, Romney’s people noticed this and decided to hitch a ride on the issue, so for the last few weeks of the campaign his advertising focused on the fact that he supported “English” while his Democratic rival opposed it.

IOW, Unz takes credit for making Romney move far right.