Mitt's waterworks: cause for concern?

Published Dec 18 2007, 09:26 PM by Adam Reilly

As the Herald's Jessica Van Sack notes, Mitt Romney has been choking up a lot lately. On Sunday, he did it while discussing the LDS Church's past exclusion of blacks from the priesthood on Meet the Press (see above). And yesterday, according to the AP, the tears came as Romney recalled watching a soldier's body being returned via casket from Iraq.

But Van Sack and the AP are forgetting another teary Romney moment. This one came in his much-ballyhooed "Faith in America" speech on December 6. Here's how Salon's Walter Shapiro described it:

[O]n Thursday something happened that Romney could not control. At the end of his speech in Texas on his Mormon faith and his view of religion in public life, he got emotional. He lost it in the tiniest way.
He was recalling the early days of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, on the brink of the Revolutionary War, when the early Americans from various faiths were gathered together. They wanted to pray, Romney said, but they did not know whose prayer to use.
"Then Sam Adams rose, and said he would hear a prayer from anyone of piety and good character, as long as they were a patriot," Romney said, reading off the teleprompter. "And so together they prayed, and together they fought, and together, by the grace of God, they founded this great nation."
The crowd began to applaud, and Romney's chin appeared to tense. In the slightest way, his eyes seemed to moisten. For an instant he looked vulnerable, like a young man who had been moved by his own words, by his own hopes for his country. The preselected crowd, sensing this, rose to its feet with a standing ovation. There were only three sentences left in the speech, but the whole event was put on hold. After a few more seconds, Romney collected himself and finished the speech. [emph. added]

What's with all the waterworks? As a Romney skeptic, my cynical take is that, with folksy Mike Huckabee breathing down his neck, Romney is deliberately working to soften up his Stepford Husband image.

Then again, maybe Romney's tears have been genuine. In that case, though, shouldn't the electorate be concerned?

I'm serious here. Remember, one tearing-up moment destroyed Edmund Muskie's presidential hopes in 1972--and now Romney has gotten misty three times in short succession. Even if standards have changed when it comes to male crying, that's an awful lot of barely controlled emotion for an aspiring president.

Attachment: http://thephoenix.com/MediaLog/content/binary/f3ce5aa040_romney12172007.jpg

Loose ends: winter holiday edition!

Fake-news comeback

2 Comments

Patrick said:

I am Catholic and I had a similar reaction when my church finally admitted the earth revolves around the sun -- I think it was 1996. I was stuck in traffic on Storrow Drive. I got out of my car and tried to high five the guy behind me, but instead he threatened to run my a** over if I didn't get back in my car and start driving.

But seriously, I don't think Mitt knows what he believes anymore -- and that must be quite unsettling. Russert went down a laundry list of his flip flops, and true to fashion, one by one, Mitt offered a perfectly rational and highly scripted explanation. But when he was finished, I am sure if you asked him what color the is sky he would have been at a loss, and may have started to weep.

December 19, 2007 1:39 AM
acf said:

The Romney campaign has been pretty consistent about picking a theme for the day and week, and coordinating his activities to reinforce that theme. This crying thing is nothing more than the theme of the week. It has decided that he needs to warm up his cold hearted corporate raider persona, and what better way to do it than by crying. I might believe that he thought about his sons when hearing about a dead soldier, but to then bring it up as a campaign theme is too calculating. Also, the very idea that he pulled off the side of the road and wept when he heard that his religion dropped their opposition to allowing blacks to join, is ludicrous in the extreme. Are there really people who fall for this stuff?

December 21, 2007 5:07 AM