Shades of George W. Bush

The NY Times reports that while MA Governor from 2003-07, Mitt Romney spent 25% of his time in office away from the state. Danny Hakim writes,

When the ceiling collapsed in [Boston’s] . . . Big Dig tunnel . . . Gov. Mitt Romney was at his vacation home in New Hampshire. When the Bush administration warned that the nation was at high risk of a terror attack in December 2003, he was at his Utah retreat. And for much of the time the legislature was negotiating changes to his landmark health care bill, he was on the road. During Mr. Romney’s four-year term as governor of Massachusetts, he cumulatively spent more than a year—part or all of 417 days—out of the state, according to a review of his schedule and other records. More than 70 percent of that time was spent on personal or political trips unrelated to his job, a New York Times analysis found. Mr. Romney, now the Republican presidential nominee, took lengthy vacations and weekend getaways. But much of his travel was to lay the groundwork for the presidential ambitions he would pursue in the 2008 election, two years after leaving office.

It’s amazing the Times was even able to piece this together, considering the well-known fact that Romney’s gubernatorial staff, encouraged by the outgoing Governor himself, bizarrely were able to buy the hard drives to all their office computers, and then disposed of them. Like so much in Mitt’s life, a fog surrounds the secrets.

The story ends on a ruefully humorous note, with this coda:

Mr. Romney’s visits to New Hampshire became so frequent that The Manchester Union Leader, the state’s largest paper, wrote an editorial complaining about attempts by his security detail to cordon off a section of the lake around his home. “The Massachusetts State Police have no jurisdiction over Lake Winnipesaukee,” it said, adding that troopers from a neighboring state should not be allowed “to harass and intimidate people who are out to enjoy that section of the lake.”

Well, after all, it is his lake…