For Romney, a course set long ago

By David D. Kirkpatrick

updated 4:57 a.m. ET Dec. 18, 2007

WASHINGTON - George Romney had big ideas for his youngest child.

Mitt Romney had already made millions as the founder of a giant buyout firm. But his father wanted Mitt to follow him into politics, convinced he could unseat Senator Edward M. Kennedy in Massachusetts.

“It was Mitt’s dad that kicked us over that one,” Ann Romney, Mitt Romney’s wife, recalled of the losing 1994 Senate race. “If people understood that equation of George Romney and his impact on my life and on Mitt’s life, they wouldn’t be so curious about why Mitt is running for president. He is why Mitt is running.”

George W. Romney made his fortune turning around the American Motors Corporation before becoming governor of Michigan, then staged a bid for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, only to watch his hopes collapse on the eve of the first votes. Now nearing that pivotal time in this year’s race, Mitt Romney said he felt as if his own campaign to become the Republican nominee was, in a sense, an extension of his father’s.

“Like a baton has passed, like a relay team where the baton passed from generation to generation,” Mr. Romney said in an interview. He added, “I am a shadow of the real deal.”

In style and biography, father and son are a stark contrast. George Romney was an autodidact who never finished a year of college and stumbled into politics while opening a restaurant. He was a fiery campaigner who relished a fight, an earnest speaker who could never tell a joke and a last champion of the liberal wing of the Republican Party. Mitt earned dual Harvard degrees in law and business, pulls off a practiced one-liner at almost every debate and presents himself on the campaign trail as the candidate to return the Republican Party to its conservative roots.

Mr. Romney, though, insists the similarities far outweigh the differences. The label that best fits him, he suggests, is George Romney Republican — what he describes as “a very intensely practical person” less committed to any ideology than to bridging divides and “helping people.”

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On the trail, his father’s ghost hovers constantly over the Romney campaign. They look so much alike that a photograph of Mitt might be easily mistaken for a picture of his father, although by 60 — they ran for president at the same age — the gray hair now visible at Mitt Romney’s temples had circled his father’s face like a halo.

Impatient ambition
Both father and son have displayed an impatient ambition, each turning his attention to the White House almost as soon as he was elected governor — the father in Michigan, the son in Massachusetts. When Mitt started planning his own race, he took lessons from his father’s 1968 run, even handing his campaign manager a study that identified 20 reasons for his father’s defeat. Mitt Romney’s first draft of every speech, his campaign aides say, includes at least one story about his father.

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Both have also struggled against charges of inconsistency — George Romney for abandoning his early support of the Vietnam War with the explanation that he had had a “brainwashing,” his son for moving away from liberal positions he had taken in Massachusetts.

Some Romney advisers see a connection there, too. “George was blunt, candid and stubborn,” said Richard Eyre, a family friend who worked on George Romney’s campaign and wrote the study of its failings. It was that shoot-from-the-hip style that got him in trouble in 1968, Mr. Eyre argued, and it was a reaction to his father’s careless candor that has led Mitt Romney to rely on polished sound bites of Republican orthodoxy.

“He is trying so hard not to make the same mistake as his father at the expense of swinging a little too far the other way,” Mr. Eyre said. “Everything he says sounds like he has practiced it three times.”

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