The Holy Cow! Candidate - © Copyright 2005 The Atlantic Monthly
This year, naturally, Governor Romney was the primary target of this heavily Democratic crowd. Speakers ribbed him for, among other things, his exploratory political trips out of state and his opposition to cloning human embryos. “I don’t know if the governor knows its advantages,” a Democratic state senator named Jack Hart said. “I mean, he could run for governor and for president at the same time. And then if he was to run for president, he could choose his perfect running mate: himself.”But the best one-liners at Romney’s expense came from Romney. Standing at the podium to begin his remarks, he said, “Well, it’s great to be here in Iowa this morning—whoops, wrong speech.” He threw down a piece of paper and then continued. “Seriously, it’s good to be here in Massachusetts. I’m visiting for a few days.” Everybody cracked up, and from that moment the room was his. He kept up a genuinely funny line of patter—much of it self-deprecating and based on his presumptive aspirations to higher office—for eight minutes; in comedy terms he killed. (Sample joke: As a Mormon, he said, “I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman.”)
Not so long ago it would have been hard to imagine Mitt Romney—a Midwest-raised Mormon businessman—joking around with a bunch of Irish and Italian Democrats at a political backslapping session in Boston. If he had initially hoped to go into politics, he would have been best served by staying in Michigan, where Romney was a household name. Instead Willard Mitt Romney (he shed the Willard in kindergarten) went from Bloomfield Hills to Palo Alto (he began his undergraduate education at Stanford University) to France to Provo, Utah (he completed his undergraduate education at Brigham Young University, finishing first in his class), before coming with his young wife, Ann, to Massachusetts in 1971, to attend Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. There he overlapped with George W. Bush. (”We shared one class,” Romney told me. “I don’t recall that either one of us stood out in that class. I don’t recall anything he said, and I don’t imagine he remembers anything I said either … If I knew where he was gonna go, I would have been on him like white on rice.”)
After graduation from HBS, Romney entered the burgeoning field of consulting, and in the late 1970s he landed at Bain & Company. Until then the business of consulting had been kind of hit-and-run: a firm would take on a client to help with a particular issue, provide some analysis, and then send the client on its way. Bain did things differently. Bainies, as they were known, became deeply involved with the companies they advised, learning everything about their businesses, the industries they worked in, and the competitors they were up against. When an analysis was finished, Bainies didn’t pack up and leave. They stayed with the company, making sure it continued to apply the lessons it had learned.
July 30th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
I read the article, Gurl, and I agree that it is very good. Questions like those about the garments WILL be asked, and geting them out of the way early, and in a manner which flatters the Governor, are a bonus.
I honestly think that the punditocracy is overestimating the hostility of evangelicals to Mormons. What they want is a moral PERSON, and Romney is that.
Don’t forget, Gore was the Baptist, and Bush is a Methodist. The person is bigger than the denomination.