Mitt Romney and the Tea Party: It’s Complicated

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Does Mitt Romney think tea partiers are nuts? It seems like a reasonable question to ask the potential presidential contender. While most of the other candidates hoping to run for the White House in 2012 have gone out of their way to prove their tea party bona fides, Romney has kept his distance, perhaps for good reason. Lots of tea partiers won’t forgive him for paving the way for the Obama health care reform plan with RomneyCare, as it’s dubbed, when he was governor of Massachusetts. But Romney’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) Friday was extremely well-received by an audience that included a healthy number of self-declared tea partiers. Indeed, he offered a lot a tea partier could love: talk of job creation, American exceptionalism, and a plug for the Constitution. He also has business credentials to die for, his health care record not withstanding.

But at least one tea party activist who’s been in contact with Romney’s campaign says that he has been reluctant to take one important move that would solidify his standing with the grassroots conservative movement: signing its “Contract from America.”

Last year, Ryan Hecker from the Houston Tea Party Society helped create a crowdsourced agenda that tea partiers wanted to see enacted in Washington. It emphasized limited government, fiscal responsibility and individual liberty, and asked signers to pledge to support a balance budget, tax reform, repeal of ObamaCare, a ban on earmarks, and to oppose cap and trade, among other things. The earmark ban scared off a fair number of candidates and members of Congress. But as Hecker says, “There’s nothing in there that a guy who doesn’t write legislation couldn’t support.” One of the first signers was Newt Gingrich. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) was also an early endorser. But when Hecker, who appeared on a CPAC panel right before Romney took the stage, asked Romney to sign the contract, he “took a pass,” says Hecker, without explaining exactly why.

Hecker thinks Romney is an impressive candidate, who heroically turned around the Salt Lake Olympics, and is a “great businessman.” But Romney’s failure to sign the contract, says Hecker, hurts his standing with tea partiers, who are going to be critical to the 2012 election and who could potentially help Romney compensate for his problems with evangelicals who refuse to support his campaign. (They don’t like his Mormonism and still believe that he’s secretly pro-choice.) “I think it’s important that he sign the Contract with America,” Hecker says. “He needs to show that he’s listening to the tea party and that he’s going to be a leader who represents true conservatives.”

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

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