I've been watching Romney's botched general election rollout, and this last news cycle's stories about "Romney the Bully" (including Benjy Sarlin's piece on Romney's handling of the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth) with a great deal of interest and a rather generous sense of validation.
My fellow grad students at the University of Massachusetts and I had the great displeasure of dealing with the petty tyrant version of Mitt (and his past and present advisor Eric Fehrnstrom) back in 2005. After a long and rancorous collective bargaining negotiation with university administration, the union that represents the 2500 or so grad student workers at UMass finally reached an agreement that involved some significant concessions by the union (this was back in 2003 through 2005, when economic times were not good in the Commonwealth and state funding for higher education had reached its 49th in the nation nadir). The CBA included significant cuts to our health care benefits, as well as de minimis raises that did not even keep pace with inflation. When you're a grad student making $12,000 a year, those cuts were painful, but deemed the best we could do given the state's budget constraints and an intransigent university administration.
Unfortunately for us, that CBA also had to be funded by the legislature and signed into law by Romney. Unsurprisingly, Romney proved a major obstacle, demanding that we agree to zero percent raises over the life of the three-year agreement as a baseline (on top of the cuts to our benefits), with a one percent "pool" that could be divvied up amongst the highest performers, as measured by some yet-to-be-determined metric (never mind that a merit-based system for grad students who are learning to teach and conduct research makes no sense whatsoever).
While I guess it's no surprise that a Republican governor would take a hard line with unionized state employees, it was the pettiness of his "negotiations" with us that was really appalling. When his advisors (including Fehrnstrom) actually deigned to meet with us (after refusing, canceling, or no-showing on numerous occasions), the message that was communicated was that the good Governor thought we should be grateful that the university was paying us at all for the privilege of attending school (never mind that grad students taught half of the classes and provided much of the labor in the science labs) and that, we could either take a further round of cutbacks or Romney would take great pleasure in simply vetoing our contract funding every year until he was out of office, ensuring that our $12,000 a year stayed $12,000 until at least 2006. Never once did they argue that it would cost the state too much (it was not that much money). It was simply, no, I will make your lives hell if you don't give me the ideological victory that I want. It was Romney the bully, picking on the grad students making $12,000 a year simply because he could. This posturing went on for months and months and was only dropped when we managed to accumulate a veto-proof majority in the legislature for our contract funding.
The Romney that we dealt with during those negotiations, the one that was so bound and determined to inflict maximum pain on a population of rather economically vulnerable grad students out of sheer pettiness, is the Romney that I recognized in the Washington Post story today.