But just a few months after Mr. Romney took office in 2003, what he delivered seemed anything but friendly to the C.E.O. crowd: a bill to financial firms for what they saw as $110 million in new corporate taxes — and a promise of more to come.
“How could he do this to businesses as a business guy?” Joe Casey, then a top executive at a Massachusetts bank, Seacoast Financial, recalled asking colleagues whose companies had to pay up after the Romney administration closed a tax loophole. “It was very aggressive, and it was a surprise.”
For the next three years, the Romney administration relentlessly scoured the tax code for more loopholes, extracting hundreds of millions of corporate dollars to help close budget gaps in a state with a struggling economy. It was only after Mr. Romney was gearing up in 2005 for a possible White House bid that he backed away from some of his most assertive tax enforcement proposals amid intensifying complaints from local companies and conservative antitax groups in Washington.
Mr. Romney’s campaign against the tax loopholes, like no other period in his career, put him at odds with the values and expectations of the corporate world from which he came. Today, in seeking the Republican presidential nomination, Mr. Romney promotes himself as the pro-business candidate who understands what companies need and how to create jobs.
An examination of the period reveals a more complicated picture. It shows a governor who sometimes put the need to find new revenues ahead of the conservative argument that tax increases almost by definition kill jobs; a shrewd financial manager who aides said was guided by a strong sense of rectitude, not just pragmatism; and a political aspirant willing to buck the orthodoxies of his own party — at least, state lawmakers said, until his national ambitions tempered that impulse and led him to steer a more conservative course.
Today Mr. Romney rarely, if ever, discusses on the campaign trail how he closed the Massachusetts tax loopholes. There is no proud description of them in his two books, even though many lawmakers in the state consider them a rare show of political courage.
“I was surprised that he did what I thought was the right thing to do,” said Michael W. Morrissey, a Democratic state senator during the Romney years and now a district attorney in the state.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Mr. Romney and a former aide in his administration, defended his record, saying he had been on good terms with a business community that benefited from a variety of his economic development policies. “Did they see eye to eye on everything?” Mr. Fehrnstrom said. “Not always. But more than anything they appreciated the strong leadership Mitt Romney brought to the governor’s office in getting the budget under control and bringing the state economy out of its tailspin.”
When he proposed the tax changes, Mr. Romney argued that they amounted to vigilant and fair enforcement of existing rules. Massachusetts business leaders said he was simply raising their taxes — a view that could complicate Mr. Romney’s bid for the presidency.
Aides said his retreat on the issue displayed a responsiveness to constituents and the give-and-take of political negotiations, but some lawmakers in the State House said it fit a familiar pattern. “He was positioning himself for a long-range future plan,” said Representative Kay Khan, a Democrat. “Every move was quite calculated.”
Closing Tax Loopholes
In his 2002 campaign for governor, Mr. Romney ran as a turnaround artist. After a career as a venture capitalist asking companies for money, he liked to tell audiences, he was eager to ask for something else: jobs in Massachusetts.
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