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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
On a recent Thursday in Derry, New Hampshire, Mitt Romney, the Republican Presidential candidate, was engaged in a conversation about milkshakes. It was early afternoon at a nineteen-fifties-themed diner called MaryAnn's, and Romney, surrounded by cameramen and reporters, went from table to table introducing himself to voters. Before running for office in Massachusetts--unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 1994 and, successfully, for governor in 2002--Romney made a fortune as a management consultant and leveraged-buyout specialist, and, in twenty-five years in the business world, he learned to love information-gathering. "There are answers in numbers--gold in numbers," he wrote in "Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership, and the Olympic Games," his 2004 memoir. "Pile the budgets on my desk and let me wallow." His campaign manager, Beth Myers, told me recently that Romney regularly checks Mittromney.com, and sends off e-mails to aides, asking them to add more detailed information to the site.
At MaryAnn's, Romney, his suit jacket removed and his sleeves rolled up, made his way swiftly through the restaurant, methodically quizzing the patrons. He sat down with two gray-haired women in a booth and pointed to a creamy drink on the table. "Is this a malt or is this a milkshake?" he asked.
"It's a frappe," one of the women replied.
"We call that a milkshake in the Midwest," Romney, who has lived in Massachusetts for the past thirty-six years, said. "It's a frappe here, right? This is ice cream and, and--"
"And milk," the woman replied.
"And milk, yeah. How are you doing? I'm Mitt Romney."
Romney is smart. He was chosen as the speaker for his graduating class at Brigham Young University. He pursued joint graduate degrees at Harvard, in law and business, graduating cum laude in law and in the top five per cent of his class at the business school. "I like smart people," he wrote in "Turnaround." "A lot." But, like many smart overachievers, especially in politics, he sometimes tries a little too hard. The conversation turned from frappes to health care, and he asked, "Is it O.K. here in New Hampshire?"
"I live in Vermont," one of the women responded.
"I live in Massachusetts," the other said.
Undaunted, Romney cheerily pressed for their views on how to improve the health-care system. One of the women made a pitch for more government spending on care for the elderly. The poor, she argued, benefit from government programs, and the rich can afford their own care. "I think the middle people need some help." Romney perked up and patiently explained the details of a 2004 law that provided more state assistance for home care. His new friends were smitten. "That's a nice idea," one of them said. Romney did not mention that the new rules applied only to the poor.
Romney walked into a room decorated with posters of fifties icons. He stood before Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and chatted with a table of patrons finishing plates of home fries and eggs. Suddenly, a heavyset man wearing a bright-orange cap entered the room. "Mr. Romney," he called out. "Eric Orff--I'm a hunter." It was a potentially awkward moment. Earlier this year, Romney claimed that he'd "been a hunter pretty much all my life." A few days later, he said in a statement, "I've hunted small game numerous times." Four days after that, Romney told W. Gardner Selby, of the Austin American-Statesman, "Any description of my being a hunter is an overstatement of capability."
Still, he couldn't resist. "You're a hunter?" he said to Orff. "Well, same here. Good to see ya." Orff had a question about the environment: "It's eighty degrees today. What are we going to do about global warming?" Romney's response was quick and concise. "We're going to get ourselves off of foreign oil," he said. "And to do that it's going to take nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles, and then we're going to dramatically reduce our greenhouse gases." It was a good answer, but also a strange one. Not long ago, Romney released a glossy pamphlet detailing his positions on major issues. He sounded like Al Gore when talking to the environmentalist in New Hampshire, though his policy book's treatment of global warming reads more like something from ExxonMobil. In it, Romney refers to the "debate" over "how much human activity impacts the environment"--code words for the global-warming-denial crowd. He offers no plan to "dramatically" curtail emissions of CO, just an aside that "we may well be able to rein in our greenhouse-gas emissions." As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney, in December, 2005, pulled out of a Northeast-state agreement on carbon reduction--a plan that he had supported the month before.
This is a habit of Romney's. Politicians tend to...
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