Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s wife Ann is now raising some eyebrows by declaring the “country lost” by re-electing Mitt Romney.
Ann Romney has a message for the country that rejected her husband: Your loss, America!
The Romney family postmortem/movie promotion continued Friday with Ann reflecting on Mitt’s defeat in the 2012 presidential election.
“I really believe this, you know, we lost, but truly the country lost by not having Mitt as president,” Ann said during an interview on Fox News.
She opted to be “polite and nice” and not comment on President Obama’s second term, but said she comes across people all the time who are “still really sad” about the outcome of the 2012 race.
But her declaration is not a surprise — given the film “Mitt” on Netflix.
The film has increasingly surprised many who saw a Romney they didn’t think existed: a private Romney who was quite endearing, regardless of his (often poorly) articulated positions during his ill-fated 2012 presidential campaign. Indeed, the film showed a Mitt Romney some moderates and independents had liked: a Romney close to the one they imaged when he was a moderate governor of Massachusetts.
Romney later fled away from that label as frantically as teenager asked to do the dishes.
He changed his positions so many times that by the end of his campaign he looked like a wealth Beverly Hills resident who had far too many face lifts.
And it stands to reason. As I noted here, when I did talking head appearances on CNN during the campaign techs at various broadcast sites named Romney as one of their favorite celebrities and the Romney they described was the one shown in the film. His tragedy: he didn’t let the America see that Romney. He became the classic case of an overmanaged candidate shaped, then reshaped, then reshaped again, by campaign consultants until there seemed to be no there there — or a there without a hard core. The hard core seemed to be political expediency.
So the tragedy could be: yes, Romney might have done better if he followed his political heart.
And his instincts — as a human being.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.