Mitt Romney makes no secret of his belief that his father in heaven is looking down at the presidential race. Romney told David Kirkpatrick of The New York Times that George Romney is saying, “Let me in there, coach! Let me go down there and give him help!'” Young Romney said he feels his own campaign for the presidency is an extension of his father’s 1968 run. “I am a shadow of the real deal,” he said.
Aside from the striking physical similarities and the full head of hair, Mitt also has a lock on his father’s body language, on the confident, authoritative, and masterful look.
But there is another dead giveaway. Look carefully at the pictures of Mitt campaigning. Three out of every four photographs have him pointing his finger or extending his arms, not in a belligerent way but as a gesture to show that he is in command.
Where did that technique come from? It came from George the father, of course, whose “ghost,” wrote Kirkpatrick, “hovers constantly over the Romney campaign.”
When George Romney first ran for governor of Michigan in 1962, three out of every four photographs showed him pointing. His Democratic opponent that year was John Swainson, the incumbent governor. Swainson, a college classmate of mine, told me a few years later, when he heard I was covering Romney’s 1968 presidential campaign, “Watch George when the cameras are around. Immediately he will start gesticulating with his pointed finger so that everybody else in the picture seems to be listening to George.” When Swainson finally caught on, he said, he would ” raise my pointed finger the minute he raised his.” Swainson needed more than a pointed finger, as it turns out. He lost by 80,000 votes.
George Romney’s presidential campaign, meanwhile, ended almost before it started. In August, 1967, explaining to a Detroit TV interviewer why he kept shifting ground on the Vietnam War, he said that during his earlier visit to Vietnam the U.S. military had given him ‘the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” It wasn’t that anybody doubted the military engaged in brainwashing, more delicately known as spinning. It was that Romney was admitting he had been unable to resist the effects of having had his brains washed.
As we tracked him that autumn from Bismarck and Fargo, North Dakota, to Phoenix, to Denver, the quote followed him like a little snapping dog. He tried to turn the quote against Lyndon Johnson. “Apparently there were a lot of brainwashed voters in 1964,” he said, not thinking such a remark might result in major fallout from the forty-three million brainwashed Americans who had voted for Johnson in 1964.
When the Romney campaign reached New England, he was hit by a comment from Republican Senator Robert Stafford of Vermont: “If you’re running for the presidency, you are supposed to have too much on the ball to be brainwashed.”
Two weeks before the New Hampshire primary, the campaign folded, and Romney’s brainwashing line was immediately enrolled in the Foot-in-Mouth Hall of Fame, alongside Tom Dewey’s “What’s the matter with that idiot engineer” (accidently spoken into a microphone when his whistle-stopping train failed to move quickly enough for the candidate) Roman Hruska’s “Aren’t the mediocre people entitled to a little representation?,” (uttered in defense of a Richard Nixon Supreme Court possibility) George H. W. Bush’s “Read my lips,” and Bill Clinton’s “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”
The Kirkpatrick piece in the Times said Mitt is determined to avoid his father’s mistakes, and turned over to his campaign manager a study that set out twenty reasons for George’s defeat. One of the twenty was George’s tendency to shoot from the hip, something Mitt has avoided so far. But like most politicians, young Romney is prone to exaggeration. The most recent was his claim that “I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.” Challenged by the media, Romney told The New York Times that “I did not see it with my own eyes. But I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great event.” One of Romney’s spokesmen, trying to be helpful, added, “It’s like I said, I can see Mike Huckabee as president.”
Whoops! Two new candidates for the Foot-in-Mouth Hall of Fame.
Roger Mudd was a congressional correspondent for CBS News for eighteen years and chief Washington correspondent for NBC News for five (and a co-anchor there for two years). He has also been a political correspondent for the NewsHour, documentary host on The History Channel, and taught at Princeton and at Washington and Lee. His book The Place to Be: Washington, CBS, and the Glory Days of Television News will be published by PublicAffairs in March. Mudd is one of several veteran journalists who are appearing as guest writers for CJR’s Campaign Desk during the course of the presidential campaign.