Opinion: Romney plays the family card
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Just in time for the Family Research Council’s values conference in Washington this weekend, the Mitt Romney campaign premiered tonight online and unleashes in Iowa today a new ad titled ‘Our Home’ featuring his wife, Ann, talking smoothly about, this won’t surprise you, their family and how her husband thinks the most important work in America is done within the four walls of the family home.
They do make an impressive clan on the surface, an idyllic family with the problem-solving businessman, former governor candidate with the movie-hero jaw and presidential posture, his high school sweetheart wife of 38 years, five boys from 25 to 36 and their wives and 10 children. They’ve all been on the trail together or separately this year and the sons have even blogged about their campaign journeys in the Mitt-mobile, a used Winnebago (made in Iowa, by the way).
It’s a none-too-subtle political plus for Romney, especially in the conservative Republican competition where voters can compare the photogenic Romney family to the older Fred Thompson with his much-younger second wife, Jeri, and a second set of children; the twice-married John McCain; and Rudy Giuliani, who’s on his third marriage and not very good relations with his children from the others.
And Romney got some other good news in a new CNN-Opinion Research Corp. poll of 1,212 taken last weekend and released today, showing that a vast majority of Americans (77%) at least say that his Mormon religion is not a factor in their choice for president. As if to confirm this, Romney yesterday won the endorsement of Bob Jones III, the president and grandson of the founder of the conservative evangelical Bob Jones University in Greenville, S.C.
It’s their family, of course, but it hasn’t always helped them. Previous campaign emphasis on the seemingly-perfect Romney crowd in state campaigns didn’t go over too well. In fact, the ads struck many as cloying and drew derision, along with an Ann Romney newspaper interview in which she claimed the couple had never argued in what is now a 38-year marriage. Yeah right, was the general reaction to that.
But that was the 1990s and that was Massachusetts, where both conservative Republican voters were out of state on election day. This time it’s the Republican primary in places like Iowa, where families still go to church and watch evening TV together with a bowl of ice cream, and a quick shot of a grandpa turning a toddler upside-down doesn’t seem at all staged.
Oh, and by the way, Romney and clan hold a sizable lead there. Maybe there’s a connection.
--Andrew Malcolm