I FIRST met Mitt Romney at a Lincoln Day dinner in 1994, during the earliest days of his failed Senate race against Ted Kennedy. The next weekend, I was helping him to collect the signatures he needed to get on the ballot for the Republican primary. In a supermarket parking lot, Mr. Romney dashed about for hours introducing himself to voters, few of whom knew who he was.
It was Mr. Romney’s first real campaign and his first time collecting signatures. He enjoyed learning the intricacies of retail politics even at their most banal: I remember that he was impressed by the expertise of veteran signature-gatherers in the arcane area of clipboard management....Fourteen years ago, many of us who were close to Mr. Romney’s Senate campaign in Massachusetts thought he was too decent for his own good. He never made political use of Senator Kennedy’s epic personal peccadilloes, even though late-night comedians mocked them on a regular basis.
Only six weeks before the 1994 election, Mr. Romney held a slim lead in the polls. Perhaps he could have closed the deal if he had run a more bare-knuckled campaign. He didn’t.
Mr. Romney’s 1994 campaign, errors included, reflected the candidate’s character. His 2008 campaign has not. I hope Mr. Romney does well enough in Michigan today that he gets the opportunity to introduce the public to the real Mitt Romney.
He is a wonderful and gifted guy. It would be nice if he and his campaign allowed the voters in on that secret.
I think that secret will slowly leak out, despite protests from the media.
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