A very informative article.
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Learning to Like Mitt
Andrew Ferguson, reluctant Romneyite
SEP 3, 2012, VOL. 17, NO. 47 BY ANDREW FERGUSON
Romney once famously called himself severely conservative. Other adverbs fit better: culturally, personally, instinctively. He seems to have missed out on The Sixties altogether, and wanted to. As a freshman at Stanford he protested the protesters, appearing in the quad carrying signs of his own: SPEAK OUT, DONT SIT IN! In 1968 the May riots stranded him in Paris. The disorder appalled him, the authors write. He left Stanford for BYU, where long hair, rock bands, and peace symbols were banned. As a young go-getter he liked to give friends copies of Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hilla Stephen Covey for the Coolidge era, sodden with moral uplift. (Even his anachronisms are anachronistic.) There was nothing jaded about him, a school friend tells the authors, nothing skeptical, nothing ironic.
At his wedding, he declined when the photographer asked him to kiss the bride: Not for cameras, he said. Since that day, Ann says, they havent had an argument; friends believe her. And their kidsweve all seen their kids. The authors tick off a typical week for the young family. Sunday: church, reflection, volunteer work, family dinners. Monday: family night, when the family gathered for Bible stories and skits about animals. Tuesday was for family basketball games and cookouts. Friday was date night for Mitt and Ann. Saturday was for doing chores, and so on, in a pinwheel of wholesomeness that a -post-60s ironist can only gape at, disbelieving. The Romneys present a picture of an American family that popular culture has been trying to undo sincewell, since An American Family, the 1973 PBS documentary that exposed the typical household as a cauldron of resentment and infidelity.
Learning to Like Mitt | The Weekly Standard
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Learning to Like Mitt
Andrew Ferguson, reluctant Romneyite
SEP 3, 2012, VOL. 17, NO. 47 BY ANDREW FERGUSON
Romney once famously called himself severely conservative. Other adverbs fit better: culturally, personally, instinctively. He seems to have missed out on The Sixties altogether, and wanted to. As a freshman at Stanford he protested the protesters, appearing in the quad carrying signs of his own: SPEAK OUT, DONT SIT IN! In 1968 the May riots stranded him in Paris. The disorder appalled him, the authors write. He left Stanford for BYU, where long hair, rock bands, and peace symbols were banned. As a young go-getter he liked to give friends copies of Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hilla Stephen Covey for the Coolidge era, sodden with moral uplift. (Even his anachronisms are anachronistic.) There was nothing jaded about him, a school friend tells the authors, nothing skeptical, nothing ironic.
At his wedding, he declined when the photographer asked him to kiss the bride: Not for cameras, he said. Since that day, Ann says, they havent had an argument; friends believe her. And their kidsweve all seen their kids. The authors tick off a typical week for the young family. Sunday: church, reflection, volunteer work, family dinners. Monday: family night, when the family gathered for Bible stories and skits about animals. Tuesday was for family basketball games and cookouts. Friday was date night for Mitt and Ann. Saturday was for doing chores, and so on, in a pinwheel of wholesomeness that a -post-60s ironist can only gape at, disbelieving. The Romneys present a picture of an American family that popular culture has been trying to undo sincewell, since An American Family, the 1973 PBS documentary that exposed the typical household as a cauldron of resentment and infidelity.
Learning to Like Mitt | The Weekly Standard
