Collision 2012: Obama vs. Romney and the Future of Elections in America by Dan Balz Read Free Book Online

reelected—and how the battles of his first years in office had shaped or changed that vision. As he prepared for the reelection campaign, the other question was whether he had lost some of his ability to connect with the voters. Was the disappointment that registered in the polls something that could be overcome with a vigorous campaign, or had too many people simply given up on him?
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    Mitt Romney was unknown in a more ordinary way. Though he had run for president in 2008, he left few deep impressions on the public. He had a glittering record of success, a résumé that was enviable in both the public and private sectors, and a huge personal fortune. What he lacked was a clear political identity. Was he a northeastern moderate, as he had appeared in his earliest incarnations as an office seeker? Was he a true conservative, as he had tried to present himself in his first campaign for the White House? Or was he a conservative of convenience, who saw changes in his own party and the constituencies he was trying to please and made the necessary adjustments, adapting in order to succeed?
    If there was a single influence on his life, it was his father, George Romney. The father had been born in Mexico in a Mormon colony, the child of a familythat had fled the United States and then, when George Romney was five, would flee Mexico and return to the United States under threat from revolutionaries. George Romney was a powerful personality and a driven man who in the postwar years had risen through the ranks of the automobile industry to become chairman and CEO of American Motors Corporation. In 1962, he ran for governor of Michigan, after first asking his family whether he should run as a Democrat or a Republican. At the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he walked out in protest of Barry Goldwater’s opposition to civil rights legislation. As the 1968 presidential campaign neared, he was considered a leading contender for the Republican nomination, but his candidacy proved to be short-lived, undone by a comment in which he said he had been “brainwashed” by the generals and others about the Vietnam War.
    Mitt was the youngest child in the family, and he developed a special and close relationship with his father. Mitt Romney was at his father’s side throughout his father’s rise in politics. He accompanied his father on the campaign trail, offered advice to his father when he was governor, and ached over his demise as a presidential candidate. Their personalities were different. His father was headstrong and outspoken, sometimes to a fault. Mitt Romney was more cautious and careful—and reserved. In their revealing biography
The Real Romney,
Michael Kranish and Scott Helman wrote, “A wall. A shell. A mask. There are many names for it, but many who have known or worked with Romney say the same thing: he carries himself as a man apart, a man who sometimes seems to be looking not in your eyes but past them. . . . Even some of Romney’s closest friends don’t always recognize the man they see from afar. This is a vexing rap to those in his inner circle—his wife, his family and his closest confidants. They see a different Mitt Romney. . . . The man they know is warm. He’s human. He’s silly. He’s funny, though sometimes his attempts at humor drift into corniness or just pure oddness. He’s deeply generous with both his time and his money when people need a lift.”
    Mitt Romney began his life in a comfortable neighborhood in Detroit, but the family moved when he was six to Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb. He attended the exclusive Cranbrook School, a private boys’ school, beginning in seventh grade. He went on to Stanford University, where he avoided the antiwar demonstrations and experimentation with drugs that were characteristic of his generation. Later he spent two years as a Mormon missionary in France. In 1969, he married Ann Davies, who converted to the Mormon faith,