All that was missing was the caldron.
Yes, Romney learned a thing or two about showmanship during his stint as leader of the Salt Lake Winter Olympics. Even more impressive, the Republican has shown that, when it comes to campaign donations, he can beg with the best of them, collecting, since January, close to $3 million from Utahns alone.
Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., collected what he could a week after Romney's Grand America fundraiser, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani plans a whistle-stop here March 30. With the 2008 presidential campaign expected to cost $1 billion, candidates can't afford to overlook any state in the hunt for funds.
At this stage of the campaign, money is a measure of credibility, and Romney is holding his own. He also appears to be backing away from certain principles he espoused years ago while trying to unseat Mr. Money Bags himself, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.
In that 1994 campaign, Romney railed against the cost of political campaigns, argued for the elimination of political action committees and favored spending limits.
"I don't like the influence of money whether it's business, labor or any other group. I do not like that kind of influence," Romney said then.
"The kinds of demands being placed on the economics of running a campaign suggest an increasing power on the part of monied interests, and I think it's wrong and we've got to change it." In his first year as governor of Massachusetts, however, Romney signed legislation abolishing a taxpayer-financed campaign election system that included limits on candidate spending. He also established state and federal Commonwealth PACs, which have raised nearly $8.75 million since 2005, some of which he gave to federal and state candidates. Then on Friday, Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference, that he would fight to repeal the bipartisan campaign reforms championed by McCain, claiming Congress "let the campaign finance lobby take away First Amendment rights." The McCain-Feingold law banned soft money and clamped down on so-called issue ads. Asked if Romney had abandoned the ideals he championed in 1994, spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom said he couldn't "speak to what he said 13 years ago" and that Romney "hasn't talked about campaign finance on a national basis." "The governor is going to play by the rules that are in effect," Fehrnstrom said.
Although Romney has been hammered for switching sides on abortion, stem-cell research and support for gay rights, little attention has been paid to his changing views on campaign finance.
Meanwhile, McCain has joined Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois in promising to rely just on public financing for the general election if either man wins his party's presidential nomination.
Each campaign would get $85 million for the general election and the candidates would have to return any private donations that they had raised for that period.
Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards has said he supports public financing for all national elections but won't accept public money - and the spending limits that come with it - while he campaigns for the White House. Sen. Hillary Clinton also has said she will forgo public funds.
The Obama-McCain truce could crank up the pressure on the other candidates to follow suit. In the meantime, the candidates gearing up for a competitive and expensive primary and finding plenty of private donors willing to help out. During Romney's coming-out National Call Day in January, the candidate raised almost as much money as George W. Bush generated in the first three weeks of his 1999 campaign, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks the influence of money in Texas politics.
By the time Bush became the GOP nominee in July 2000, he had raised more than $110 million, becoming the first major-party nominee to shun the public financing system for presidential primaries - and its voluntary fundraising and spending limits.
This year alone, candidates are hoping to raise $100 million each, or $286,000 every day.
Salt Lake City developer and Romney supporter Kem Gardner said it won't be easy for Romney.
"Hillary, McCain and Giuliani can raise more money than Mitt. They are better known and have more wealthy people in their networks," Gardner said. "Mitt has to use the people he can." People such as billionaire and cancer research benefactor Jon Huntsman Sr., who writes 25 personal letters a day seeking support outside Utah for Romney, and John Miller, CEO of National Beef, who arranges small dinner parties with influential business and political leaders.
"That's our system and it's not a bad system," said Sen. Orrin Hatch, a long-ago presidential wannabe. "It's the way you weed out those who can't make it." Craig Holman, campaign finance lobbyist for the government watchdog group Public Citizen, wasn't as complimentary. He lamented that the 2008 presidential election will exceed $1 billion and could be the first in which every candidate rejects public financing, designed to reduce the influence of special-interest money on politics.
Holman blames the bundling model of fundraising credited to Bush and adopted by Romney. Under the system, wealthy donors and interest groups commit to raising $100,000 to $200,000 from their friends and business associates. Bush dubbed his bundlers pioneers and rangers.
Donors solicited under this method put a distinct tracking number on their checks so that the campaign can monitor and credit each bundler's progress without revealing who is doing the actual fundraising. Under pressure from watchdogs, Bush revealed the names and home states of bundlers who met their targets, among them the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
"There are so many dangers to this," Holman says. "It breaks the back of the public financial system, allows candidates to evade disclosure and results in quid pro quo favors for the bundlers." Romney has not said whether he will release the names of his major campaign solicitors. But a "fact sheet" disseminated by the Romney campaign says he believes in transparency and disclosure "in a way so the public knows who's raising money and who's contributing money."
