Romney makes Utah visit

Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. and former Utah Olympic boss Mitt Romney teamed up Monday in Salt Lake City to raise some $100,000 for the Republican Governors Association.

Romney, now governor of Massachusetts, then spoke about the challenges America faces to a luncheon gathering of Zions Bank's top customers — and sounded more than ever like a candidate for president.

The GOP leader of what is an overwhelmingly Democratic state, Romney has yet to announce whether he's running for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, although there has been widespread speculation he's gearing up for the race.

The Republican National Committee raised a record $32.3 million from January through March, more than double the Democrats' total.

The RNC finished March with $26.2 million on hand, Chairman Ken Mehlman said Monday. The money it collected in the first quarter tops its fund raising during the same period in 2001 and 2002, before the national party committees were banned from collecting corporate and unlimited donations. It also exceeds its fund raising in early 2003, the first year the parties were limited to contributions from individuals and political action committees.

The Democratic National Committee raised $13.8 million in the first quarter.

Huntsman and Romney spent about two hours in a private meeting arranged by the Republican Governors Association with representatives of a number of local and national companies.

The focus of what was billed as a roundtable discussion on what companies need from state governments was education, especially in science, both Huntsman and Romney said later.

The companies participating paid the association a total of about $100,000 to attend the meeting at the Grand America Hotel. The list included Envirocare of Utah, Microsoft, Chevron and General Electric, as well as GlaxoSmithKline and other pharmaceutical companies.

"It was really kind of an open-ended roundtable," Huntsman said of the meeting. A lot of the discussion, he said, "was what they were looking for in recruiting new talent to their companies as opposed to a generation ago."

The issues surrounding preparing students for careers in math and science are not just a problem for Utah, Huntsman said.

"I think it's widespread throughout the United States," he said, noting other countries such as India and China are producing many more engineers.

Romney, too, said the discussion focused on the need for states "to step up in education to meet the international challenges. . . . To be globally competitive, we can't afford to have our school systems fall below the international competition. And they are today."