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发帖数: 4321 | 1 Published: September 19, 2012
by Frank James
As Mitt Romney continues to deal with fallout from the secretly recorded "47
percent" fundraiser video that's gone viral, in which he dissed half the
nation, more attention is being given to another recording featuring another
Romney — his mother, Lenore.
President John F. Kennedy was in the White House in 1962 when the current
Republican presidential nominee's mother sat down for an interview to speak
on behalf of her husband, George, who was then making his first run to be
Michigan's governor.
Buzzfeed's Andrew Kaczynski posted the video online on Sept. 7, well before
the former Massachusetts governor's controversial comments about Obama
supporters began to get widespread coverage. Buzzfeed describes the
interview as an infomercial. Jon Stewart used a snip of the old footage of
presidential candidate's mother on The Daily Show Tuesday. (It starts at
about the 4:48 mark.)
George Romney, born into a family that saw its fortunes decline when he was
a child because of political unrest in Mexico, where he was born, became
relatively wealthy as an adult. He was chief executive of American Motors Co.
This led the 1962 interviewer to ask Mrs. Romney how her husband could
relate to common people — given the high station he had achieved.
INTERVIEWER: "There are those who say that since he's a man of considerable
means he really doesn't care about people."
What's ironic, of course, is that the same question has been asked about her
son ever since his first political campaign in 1994, when he ran for U.S.
Senate.
Back to her interview.
LENORE ROMNEY: "You know we've only owned our home for the last four years.
He was a refugee from Mexico. He was on relief, welfare relief for the first
years of his life. But this great country gave him opportunities.
"The family was poor. He said they lived for a year on nothing but potatoes.
He's known what it is to have to work for every dime he's had since he was
12."
The fact that the Republican presidential nominee's mother mentioned her
husband's childhood on public assistance as part of her pitch to voters
shows, if nothing else, how far the nation has moved on the welfare issue
since the 1960s. George Romney won the 1962 gubernatorial election, the
first of three he would win.
The story of how young George came to be on welfare is fascinating in its
own right and is told in the biography "The Real Romney" by journalists
Michael Kranish and Scott Helman.
The presidential nominee's great-grandfather Miles was asked in the late
1880s by Mormon officials to go to Mexico to create a colony where Mormons
could practice polygamy far from the harassment of U.S. officials. It was
there that Mitt Romney's grandfather Gaskell and father, George, were born
into an increasingly prosperous family and Mormon community.
But in 1912, George, then 5, and his family fled, with thousands of other
Mormons, to the U.S. — chased out by Mexican rebels and largely leaving
their wealth behind.
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