BOSTON — As a Republican governor of Massachusetts whose legislature was 87 percent Democratic, Mitt Romney said in Wednesday's presidential debate, "I figured out from Day One I had to get along, and I had to work across the aisle to get anything done."
The result, he said, was that "we drove our schools to be No. 1 in the nation. We cut taxes 19 times."
But on closer examination, the record as governor he alluded to looks considerably less burnished than Romney suggested.
Bipartisanship was in short supply. Statehouse Democrats complained that he variously ignored, insulted or opposed them, with intermittent charm offensives. He vetoed scores of legislative initiatives and excised budget line items 844 times, according to the nonpartisan research group Fact-check.org. Lawmakers reciprocated by overriding the vast bulk of them.
The big-ticket items that Romney proposed when he entered office in January 2003 went largely unrealized, and some that were achieved turned out to have a comparatively minor impact. A wholesale restructuring of state government was dead on arrival in the legislature; an ambitious overhaul of the state university system was stillborn; a consolidation of transportation fiefs never took place.
Romney did score some successes beyond his health-care legislation, notably joining a Democratic legislature to cut a deficit-ridden budget by $1.6 billion. Some outside experts and former aides say his administration excelled at the sorts of nuts-and-bolts efficiencies that make bureaucracies run better, such as streamlining permit approvals and modernizing jobs programs.
Romney lobbied successfully to block changes in the state's much-admired charter-school program, but his own education reforms went mostly unrealized. Unemployment dropped less than a percentage point during his four years.
Romney won lawmakers' consent to streamline a tangled health-and-human-services bureaucracy, but the savings amounted to only $7 million a year. He entered office considering an eight-state compact to battle climate change but left office outside the consortium, saying it cost too much.
"He put on the table in his inaugural address, and then in his budget, a series of proposed reforms like civil-service reform, pension reform — going right to the heart of the lion's den," said Michael Widmer, president of the nonpartisan Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation. But excepting health care, "he never followed up. There was a handful of successes, but there was never a full-blown or focused program in the sense of saying, 'Here's our vision.' "
Romney's former aides disagree. "That's an overwrought type of critique," said Timothy Murphy, the health-and-human-services secretary under Romney. "If you take a look at the things the governor set out to do, we accomplished a lot."