A article in National Review, I think, said that Romney decided to not run for reelection for the governorship in 2006 because poll numbers showed his reelection was impossible.
Why was he so unpopular in 2006? He was still an incumbant and a (then?) liberal republican in a state that does elect liberal republicans. What happened?
I don’t know what his poll numbers looked like, but I think he’d already decided to run for president in 2008, and the 2006 election cycle was a bad one for Republicans because of Bush’s unpopularity and other issues.
That, and he’d already decided to base his campaign on badmouthing the “liberalism” of the state that gave him his only electoral victory ever. And he essentially quit the job to campaign full-time out of state, instead of honorably resigning. And his election was on the basis of the mad management skillz he purported to bring to the job, which were nowhere in evidence once he got it (why have we not heard more about the Big Dig overruns occurring during a series of Republican governors, including him?). The guy spent most of his time before effectively quitting the job in pursuing personal vendettas, which after all is why he went after Ted Kennedy, instead of doing what he’d said he’d do. He had also made a big showing of telling us all about how he’d use his personal connections in the corporate world to bring more jobs to the state, but did none of that - he touched up his connections only for presidential campaign contributions. You could ask about why he didn’t get credit for Romneycare, but the answer would be that it was a widespread effort led mostly by Senate President Bob Travaglini, Speaker Sal DiMasi, and MIT professor Jonathan Gruber (who showed it to be financially prudent), and he only signed on because he was still harboring thoughts of reelection as governor at the time.
So Massachusetts was entirely within its rights to tell him “Fuck you right back”. Part of that was that the Republican representation in the legislature went down to even lower levels than they had before during and right after his administration. He accomplished the seemingly-impossible task of further weakening the party in his state.
I should add, in regard to his penchant for vendettas and mere petulance, his attempts to footdrag on recognizing gay marriage by invoking an ancient antimiscegnation law, even after it became clear that most of us understood it was the right thing to do and that we were proud of it. Of course, you could also chalk that up to flipflopping, er, make that “rebranding” by the HBS/Bain guy at the time he decided he wanted to be President but that he’d have to run against his own record to do it.
Hmm. Assuming he’s the Republican nominee, could he use this to repudiate the health care bill entirely, thus increasing his cachet with Republican voters, or at least easing their fears about voting for him?
I can’t see how that would make Romney look any better.
Way too late. He’s tried every way possible to market himself to the target demographic, and every time he tries something new it makes him look worse.