The Daily Background

Two things related to the inevitable White House campaign Mitt Romney is looking to launch soon. Romney is the Republican governor of Massachusetts, and his term will expire on January 4th. According to The Hotline:

Top donors and prominent supporters of Gov. Mitt Romney have been told to expect a formal announcement of his presidential candidacy on the 8th of January. They’ve also been warned that the date could change.

This information has been included in an update to our brand new Handicapping 2008 Republicans feature. As has been said before, Romney wants to be known as the (former) governor of Massachusetts, since he’s afraid the GOP base would not look kindly to an MA governor due to the state’s politics. And he’s probably right. Romney’s got problems though.

Chiefly among them is his previous support of equality for gay Americans. During a failed 1994 bid for Senate, he conducted outreach to gay rights groups in the state, and his successful 2002 campaign for governor and conduct as governor are not going to fly well with the conservative anti-equality Republican base. I’ve written about this before. From the Boston Globe (see previous link) comes this:

When he ran against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, Romney wrote a letter to the Massachusetts Log Cabin Club, pledging that as “we seek to establish full equality for American gay and lesbian citizens, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.” During that same campaign, Romney was accused of once describing gay people as “perverse.” In response, Romney’s campaign vehemently denied that he used the word “perverse” and said that he respected “all people regardless of their race, creed, or sexual orientation.”

Romney has now been in favor of anti-equality measures in his own state and on a national level being prominent in his support of the proposed anti-equality constitutional amendment earlier this year. That brings us to the second point I wanted to mention. I’ve added a PDF copy of the letter Romney wrote in 1994 to the MA Log Cabin Republicans in an effort to get their support, to our fledgling document archive, which you can check out at thedailybackground.com/documents. Go on, check it out, read the letter Mitt Romney doesn’t want you (or the Republican base) to know ever existed.

Filed under: documents, Presidential election, Z-TDB Blog