Mitt Romney Has Some Down-to-Earth Tastes, He’d Like You to Know
Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney ate a pork chop on a stick at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, Iowa on July 11, 2011. Eric Thayer for The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER Published: September 21, 2011
Like the stars in Us Weekly, Mitt Romney wants voters to know that he is just like them.
These are all moments that he and his campaign have made a point of sharing with the public over Twitter. He has also taken a lot of flights on Southwest, an airline known for its low fares and primary-color planes, and made sure to tweet about it and name-check Southwest at every opportunity.
“I was on a flight this morning, a Southwest flight from Phoenix to, let’s see, to Burbank, and — no, it was to Orange County,” Mr. Romney told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer in an interview last Friday.
In recent weeks, Mr. Romney’s renovation of his $12 million home [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/romney-renovations-draw-media-attention/ ] in the La Jolla section of San Diego has reinforced the fact that he is a wealthy man, forcing his campaign to work harder to avoid the implication that he is out of touch with the concerns of working people. (His quip in June [ http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/16/romney-im-also-unemployed/ ] to a group of jobless people in Florida that he, too, was unemployed did not help on that front.) Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Mr. Romney’s main competitor at the moment, is conspicuously trying to draw a contrast between his own roots (humble) and Mr. Romney’s (less so).
Mr. Romney, meanwhile, has begun something of a self-initiated product-placement regimen in his campaign — to sometimes awkward effect — branding himself with less-than-luxury everyman labels.
His effort, and the response to it, highlight a vexing problem for Mr. Romney. Although he is becoming increasingly confident and relaxed on the campaign trail, he still sometimes appears as if he is trying too hard to connect, straining to show that even his perfectly coifed hair can fall out of place. Sparring with voters at town-hall-style meetings, he can come off as a scolding crossing guard, and some of his efforts at humor — like the time he pretended that a waitress in a New Hampshire diner had pinched his bottom — have fallen notably flat.
But to aides and friends of Mr. Romney, the situation is more complicated. They say this — the Southwest flying, self-deprecating, penny-pinching guy — is the real Mitt, the one they know in private, and if anything, he just wants a little public credit for some of the “regular dude” things he has always done.
Ron Kaufman, a longtime Romney adviser, recalled a moment in the 2008 presidential campaign, after Mr. Romney had withdrawn from the race and was in his Boston headquarters, helping to wind down his campaign. Senator John McCain of Arizona, to whom Mr. Romney had thrown his support, happened to be in Rhode Island campaigning that day and had offered to come up to Boston to meet with Mr. Romney. But Mr. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, said he was not free, because he already had a flight booked to visit his son in California.
“We told him to change his flight,” Mr. Kaufman said. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s a cheap flight. It’s a middle seat, but I got a great Jet Blue cheap rate.’ ” (In the end, Mr. Romney switched his flight and met with Mr. McCain.)
Other aides recall Mr. Romney sitting in coach while offering his frequent-flier upgrades to staff members, or hanging out atop a coin-operated washer and dryer on the road, waiting for his clothes to dry.
Mitt-Romney-as-regular-guy, however, is proving something of a tough sell, despite his campaign’s best efforts. Starting with his first political bid back in 1994, for the Senate seat held by Edward M. Kennedy, Mr. Romney has been defined as someone who is overly malleable for political reasons.
His critics view his new everyman routine as yet another example of what they believe to be Mr. Romney’s inauthentic shape-shifting. After all, what are the chances that the son of a governor with a strapping, all-American family and a net worth hovering around $200 million is really just an average working stiff? (Days after news broke that Mr. Romney was planning to quadruple the size of his white sand oceanfront property in La Jolla, he hosted a business round table at the Common Man restaurant in New Hampshire, much to the delight of the reporters covering him.)
Mr. Romney’s online regular-guy persona has become so prominent that bloggers and others have begun to publicly poke fun at it.
Matt Ortega, a former Democratic National Committee staff member, started a blog called Mitt’s List [ http://www.mittslist.com/ ], which mocks his Average Joe tweets, adding fake captions to the pictures Mr. Romney sends out. Below a photo of Mr. Romney at Fenway Park with some of his family and the Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly, Mr. Ortega wrote: “Taking in a baseball game with the King of Millionaire Regular Guys, Bill O’Reilly! It was so exciting to see the Boston team score a goal point!” And below a picture of Mr. Romney at Carl’s Jr., Mr. Ortega added: “I’m not used to my burgers being served wrapped in paper like that but it was a nice quaint touch!”
Mr. Ortega, who now works as a digital consultant and said he maintained the blog in his personal time, said, “I don’t know anybody, from anywhere, who tweets photos of themselves from Carl’s Jr. like, ‘Yeah, check me out!’ ”
Mr. Romney’s name-dropping of Carl’s Jr. has been so stark that, when a reporter called the chain’s corporate headquarters to confirm the price of a jalapeño chicken sandwich, the director of public relations replied, “Ah, you must be following Romney.”
But, his aides insist, he really does eat fast food — a virtual necessity of life on the campaign trail. He will always opt for the drive-through if it means he can spend more time shaking hands at an event, though he tries to make healthy choices, opting for grilled chicken sandwiches and peeling the skin off his fried chicken.
He has also bonded with his staff over their shared love of the Coen brothers, the filmmaking duo known for dark comedies and a cult following. Mr. Romney’s favorite movie is “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and he will frequently quote lines from it.
When the campaign is debating going in a certain direction or a new piece of strategy, Mr. Romney will sometimes joke, “We’re in a tight spot,” a line George Clooney’s character utters when the authorities are trying to smoke him and two fellow fugitives out of a house.
Waffle House, October 20, 2010: What can I say? I’m a waffler because I love my Waffle House! I just couldn’t decide which syrup to use. First, I thought, let’s go with the boysenberry, I declared to my family. But, soon relented that boysenberry is just unnatural and stuck to my traditional guns and went with the old fashioned syrup. http://www.mittslist.com/post/9669902061/waffle-house-october-20-2010-what-can-i-say
Troy Davis is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday for the 1989 killing of a police officer in Savannah, Ga. The Georgia pardon and parole board’s refusal [ http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/250436-parole-board-decision-and-statement-in-troy.html ] to grant him clemency is appalling in light of developments after his conviction: reports about police misconduct, the recantation of testimony by a string of eyewitnesses and reports from other witnesses that another person had confessed to the crime.
This case has attracted worldwide attention, but it is, in essence, no different from other capital cases. Across the country, the legal process for the death penalty has shown itself to be discriminatory, unjust and incapable of being fixed. Just last week, the Supreme Court granted a stay of execution for Duane Buck, an African-American, hours before he was to die in Texas because a psychologist testified during his sentencing that Mr. Buck’s race increased the chances of future dangerousness. Case after case adds to the many reasons why the death penalty must be abolished.
The grievous errors in the Davis case were numerous, and many arose out of eyewitness identification. The Savannah police contaminated the memories of four witnesses by re-enacting the crime with them present so that their individual perceptions were turned into a group one. The police showed some of the witnesses Mr. Davis’s photograph even before the lineup. His lineup picture was set apart by a different background. The lineup was also administered by a police officer involved in the investigation, increasing the potential for influencing the witnesses.
In the decades since the Davis trial, science-based research [ http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Eyewitness-Misidentification.php ] has shown how unreliable and easily manipulated witness identification can be. Studies of the hundreds of felony cases overturned because of DNA evidence have found that misidentifications accounted for between 75 percent and 85 percent of the wrongful convictions. The Davis case offers egregious examples of this kind of error.
Seven of nine witnesses against Mr. Davis recanted after trial. Six said the police threatened them if they did not identify Mr. Davis. The man who first told the police that Mr. Davis was the shooter later confessed to the crime. There are other reasons to doubt Mr. Davis’s guilt: There was no physical evidence linking him to the crime introduced at trial, and new ballistics evidence broke the link between him and a previous shooting that provided the motive for his conviction.
More than 630,000 letters pleading for a stay of execution were delivered to the Georgia board last week. Those asking for clemency included President Jimmy Carter, 51 members of Congress and death penalty supporters, such as William Sessions, a former F.B.I. director. The board’s failure to commute Mr. Davis’s death sentence to life without parole was a tragic miscarriage of justice.
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