Successful Games helped Romney make political rebound

Mitt Romney walked onto the Olympic stage in 1999 a rich businessman still smarting from losing his first bid for public office. He walked off, three years later, a star-polished candidate who would be elected governor of Massachusetts in a matter of months. This was the place of his emergence and his transition.

In rescuing the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, which had been tarnished by scandal, Romney learned the ways of Washington and the hurly-burly of politics, mastered the media, built a staff of loyalists and made fund-raising connections in Utah that have proven vital to his presidential campaign.

"The Olympics gave him a public persona he didn't have before," said Robert H. Garff, a businessman who served as the chairman of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee. "He grew into the person he is today."

But the hard-headed and hard-nosed pragmatism that allowed Romney to juggle an unruly coalition of politicians, sponsors and volunteers as chief executive of the Games, now haunts him on the campaign trail among some conservative Republicans. They complain that he has no core beliefs and shifts positions on a range of issues to placate various constituencies.

As a Republican presidential hopeful, for example, Romney portrays himself as a budget hawk who would take a hard line on federal spending and congressional earmarks, the pet projects that lawmakers insert in spending bills. Back then, though, he lobbied heavily for earmarks, helping extract millions of federal dollars for projects only remotely tied to the Olympics and drawing the ire of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a longtime critic of earmarks and now a rival for the Republican presidential nomination.

While even Romney's critics concede that the Games — which had faced serious potential financial difficulties before his arrival — were a huge success, some say he made those early problems seem worse than they were to embellish his accomplishments. Others grouse about his showman's instinct for the spotlight: the countless photo-ops, the television spots. Even the little Olympic pins sold to collectors carried his image, cloaked in the American flag.

Ever calibrating his pitch, Romney scored big sponsors (including the Games' "first official cake mix" and "Olympic meat") and sidelined critics (sometimes just by inviting them in to air their grievances). He paid attention to virtually every detail, including the scripts for board presentations and the traffic — once jumping from his car to unsnarl jammed vehicles en route to a ski event.