Trip Gabriel contributed reporting from Apopka, Fla.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Romney, Buoyed by Debate, Shows Off His Softer Side
Facing off against President Obama in Denver, Mr. Romney had been the candidate they had longed to see all year: funny (joking about the “romantic” evening he and Mr. Obama were spending on the president’s 20th wedding anniversary), commanding (challenging Mr. Obama on taxes and government spending) and even warm (placing his right hand over his heart at the end of the debate, in an homage to his supporters in the crowd). On Friday night, at a rally here, his campaign seemed determined not to let that more emotive, three-dimensional Mitt Romney slip away. Before the crowd of several thousand, Mr. Romney shared stories of friends who had died. Perhaps his most moving anecdote — about David Oparowski, a 14-year-old boy with leukemia to whom Mr. Romney had ministered — first made an appearance at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, when David’s parents talked about how Mr. Romney had tended to their son, a member of his church ward in Belmont, Mass. But Mr. Romney had never before mentioned the experience on the stump. Mr. Romney recounted how, as he sat in David’s hospital room, the teenager called him “Brother Romney” and asked him about “what’s next.” “I talked to him about what I believe is next,” said Mr. Romney, recalling that a few days later he got a call from David asking if he would help write his will. “So I went to David’s bedside and got a piece of legal paper, made it look very official,” he continued. “And then David proceeded to tell me what he wanted to give his friends. Talked about his fishing rod, and who would get that. He talked about his skateboard, who’d get that. And his rifle, that went to his brother.” He concluded: “I loved that young man.” Mr. Romney also talked about the recent death of a graduate school friend who had become a quadriplegic, and a sharpshooter killed in Afghanistan. He repeated two of the stories on Saturday night in Apopka, Fla., north of Orlando, suggesting that the effort to connect emotionally would become part of how he presents himself to voters. An adviser said that Mr. Romney decided on his own that he wanted to tell those stories onstage. But the move was also couched in a broader campaign strategy to encourage Mr. Romney to reveal a more caring, personal side of himself, a counter to his reputation as a data-driven technocrat. To that end, on Thursday, Mr. Romney also appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where he seemed to repudiate his own comments about “47 percent” of Americans who, he said at a secretly recorded fund-raiser in May, considered themselves “victims” and were dependent on the government. “I said something that’s just completely wrong,” Mr. Romney said, referring to the comments. “My life has shown that I care about 100 percent.” The campaign has begun showing a 10-minute biographical video before rallies and speeches. Mr. Romney is shown roughhousing with his sons when they were youngsters, encouraging his wife and following the public service footsteps of his father, George W. Romney, the former governor of Michigan. In one scene, Mr. Romney begins talking about his wife, gushing, “Ahh, she’s gorgeous.” Russ Schriefer, the senior strategist charged with making the film, said he got that footage by showing Mr. Romney a picture of Ann as a teenager and asking him to reflect. Mrs. Romney, who has privately argued that the campaign should display the empathetic man she loves, has also become a public advocate for her husband’s “extraordinary compassion for others,” as she said Friday night. Appearing buoyed by his widely acclaimed debate performance, the Romney on display this week was a looser, more relaxed one. The day after the debate, he could be seen joking with aides on his charter plane, and he made two unscheduled stops: one Thursday morning to address the Conservative Political Action Conference in Denver, and another Friday evening, when he and Mrs. Romney stopped at La Teresita, a Cuban restaurant in Tampa, to greet diners. At his rally here on Friday, Mr. Romney’s first story involved a friend named Billy, a quadriplegic who had come to one of his rallies about three weeks ago and, with the help of his wife, made his way through the crowd. “I reached down and I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder and I whispered into his ear, and I said, ‘Billy, God bless you, I love you,’ ” Mr. Romney said. “And he whispered right back to me — and I couldn’t quite hear what he said.” Billy, he said, “died the next day.” The crowd became hushed, seemingly as moved by listening to the tale as Mr. Romney was by telling it.
