Former US presidential hopeful Mitt Romney exits Senate with reminder of political principles

A perishing wind swept across Capitol Hill this week, causing the small army of staff to gasp audibly as they made their daily walk, suited and booted, from the metro at Union Station to the famous building across the way. The big holly wreaths at the station swayed and in the park, under their blankets, the homeless crunched into the foetal position. Leaves rustled through the avenues as if to signal a definitive changing of season in the capitol.

And it is. On Wednesday, Utah senator Mitt Romney, who was the Republican candidate for the presidential election against Barack Obama in 2012, made his farewell speech to colleagues in the chamber. Romney exits American politics almost an exotic figure among the contemporary scene, as though he has stepped from a 1950s Paramount Pictures version of what the ideal American politician should look like — lantern-jawed, upright, comically folksy with a personality informed by optimism and his religious faith. It could be argued that his brightest days in politics were achieved when his best days were already behind him. Romney was considering a third tilt at the presidency in 2016 and was among the harshest critics of the belligerent first coming of Donald Trump as a Republican, calling him out as “a phoney and fraud” during the 2016 campaign.

“He’s playing members of the American public for suckers.”

The enmity never cooled. He was among the few Republicans to vote to convict Trump in his impeachment trial and has thus found himself largely ostracised from the power centre of a party for whom his father, George, served as governor of Michigan in the 1960s. He laid aside the highest ambitions and set about contributing, in his final years, to inestimably valuable Senate bipartisan negotiations which led to, among others, the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021 and landmark gun safety legislation.

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“I rise to object,” said Democratic senator for New Jersey Corey Booker, paying tribute across the Senate floor.

“I will not let that man go quietly into the night. I found myself sitting here getting sad and angry that we are losing Mitt Romney — first of all because to the naked eye, we have so much in common. I am black and Mitt Romney is black adjacent. Mitt Romney is a man of great personal net worth and I a man of great personal net girth,” he said, before describing his years watching Romney give “a master’s class in what I believe America needs most: a person who put aside the desire for partisan adoration for a deeper conviction to stand up for our nation. I watched a man not confuse tribal celebrity with leadership significance. I watched him time and time again being harassed in airports and getting scorned for taking principled stands for what he saw as the best way to keep our country together.”

Among the idle entertaining political what-ifs includes the trajectory events might have taken if Romney had defeated Obama in 2012. He admitted at the time that he was “shell-shocked” by the scale of the loss: the campaign had been tighter than the final vote suggested. Romney was laughed at for declaring, in 2012, that Russia remained the biggest threat to America. And even a modestly successful Republican administration would probably have meant the Trump wildfire would never of had the oxygen to catch on. History may have spun in a different direction.

Anyone who watched Romney on Wednesday morning might have wondered how he failed to become president. He has the image and retains the burnished good health of the inherently wealthy (and abstemious) at 77. He has arguably the best Republican voice since former president Ronald Reagan.

Romney also had his foibles and gaffes, not least his bizarre solution for transporting the family dog on a five-hour holiday trip to their cabin on the shore of Lake Huron. The popular tale, that he “strapped” the dog to the roof of the car, conjures the image of the poor mutt tied down as though on a hospital gurney, legs akimbo and ears flapping in the wind, was not quite that bad. Romney attached the kennel to the roof, placed Seamus inside and protected him from the wind with some sort of windshield.

But still. YouTube has plenty of evidence of his campaign trail gaffes and shows of woodenness, not least Romney’s doomed attempt at hipness when he quoted the chorus from Baha Man’s Who Let the Dogs Out to a group of teenagers who, like the rest of America, did not know what to say. But on his last address to the Senate, he bowed out with a reminder of what he stood for.

“Now I have been in public service for 25 years. I have learned that politics alone cannot measure up to the challenges we face. A country’s character is a reflection not just of its elected officials but also of its people. I leave Washington to return to be one among them and hope to be a voice of unity and virtue.”

For those listening in the Senate chamber, Romney’s closing words sounded as a plea and warning. After an election year of unhinged rhetoric, it was a grace note from a departing figure of the old Republican Party.

But who was listening? By Thursday, Elon Musk was in the capitol, walking through with the air of a man inspecting a luxury building he was considering buying as an excited, younger generation of politicians gathered to greet him. Outside, the weather was still freezing and it was dark before 5pm.