The Real Romney Legacy: George Romney
The Michigan governor would not endorse conservative Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964, because of his appeals to Democratic segregationists. And when Romney was in Richard Nixon’s cabinet, he drove the president to distraction with his highly public efforts to integrate housing in all-white suburbs.
.. As president of the American Motors Company, briefly among Detroit’s most innovative car makers, Romney believed corporations had multiple stakeholders, as described by Rick Perlstein. If they are people, corporations also constitute a community of individuals who depend on each other. “Each owes a debt to the other,” a biographer quoted Romney as saying. Hoover’s rugged individualism, Romney thought, was “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.”
.. As Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Nixon, he was implacable in the view that minorities deserve access to quality housing in affluent white suburbs, so much so he became a political liability. Nixon was not willing, as Romney was, to sacrifice the support of white voters in the name of egalitarianism. Until the president cut off all funding to desegregate suburbia, Romney’s HUD, according to sociologist Christopher Bonastia, “came surprisingly close to implementing unpopular anti-discrimination policies.”
.. With Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968, liberal Republicans were on a path toward extinction. Who was the last? Some say Nelson Rockefeller. Others say George Romney. Others still say Jack Kemp. But a pretty good case can be made for George Romney’s son Mitt, particularly during his first run for president in 2008, before the former Massachusetts governor rejected his record of using liberal methods to achieve Republican goals.
.. The divisive rhetoric never came naturally to Mitt Romney. The ideology of his youth wasn’t steeped in the coded language of the Southern Strategy, as it was for candidates like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who famously called Obama America’s greatest “food-stamp president.” The ideology of Romney’s youth was the opposite.