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Thursday, June 2, 2011

Ann Romney

Ann Romney (born April 16, 1949) is the wife of American businessman and Republican Party politician Mitt Romney. From 2003 to 2007 she was First Lady of Massachusetts.
She was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and attended the private Kingswood School there, where she dated Mitt Romney. Influenced by their relationship, she converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1966. She began attending Brigham Young University, then married Mitt Romney in 1969. The couple have five children, born between 1970 and 1981. She completed her undergraduate education at Harvard Extension School with a bachelor's degree in 1975.
In 1998, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. A mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments has given her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. She found equestrian activities to be therapeutic and has become an avid participant in the sport, receiving recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level and competing professionally in Grand Prix as well. While serving as Massachusetts First Lady, she was the governor's liaison for federal faith-based initiatives. She has been involved in a number of children's charities, including Operation Kids. She was an active participant in her husband's 2008 presidential run, where she became the most visible of all the Republican candidates' wives in campaigning.

First Lady of Massachusetts and charitable work
In January 2003, following her husband's successful campaign in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, Romney became First Lady of Massachusetts, a position she held through January 2007. In that role, she generally kept a low public profile; in 2006, The Boston Globe characterized her as "largely invisible" within the state (although by then she was becoming more visible outside the state, due to national appearances in connection with her husband's possible presidential campaign).
While Massachusetts First Lady, she was active in teenage pregnancy prevention efforts. In 2004, she said she was in favor of stem cell research as long as it was done "morally and ethically". One of her rare public appearances at the Massachusetts State House came in 2004 when she lobbied the legislature to raise awareness about multiple sclerosis.
In 2005, the governor appointed his wife as head of a new special office whose purpose was to help the state's faith-based groups gain more federal monies in association with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. This came after the state had seen its share of faith-based grants decline over the preceding three years. In this unpaid Governor's Liaison position, Ann Romney was termed a "dynamo" by Jim Towey, director of the White House office.
She has been involved in a number of children's charities, including being director of the inner city-oriented Best Friends. She worked extensively with the Ten Point Coalition in Boston and with other groups that promoted better safety and opportunities for urban youths. She was given the 2006 Lifetime Achievement Award from Salt Lake City-based Operation Kids. She has also served as a board member for the United Way of America and helped found United Way Faith and Action.

Marriage and children
Immediately upon the missionary's return from France in December 1968, the pair reconnected and agreed to get married as soon as possible. Ann Davies and Mitt Romney were married by an church elder in a civil ceremony on March 21, 1969, at her Bloomfield Hills home, with a reception afterward at a local country club. The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony inside the Salt Lake Temple; her family could not attend since they were non-Mormons, but were present at a subsequent wedding breakfast held for them across the street.
The couple's first son was born in 1970 while both were undergraduates at Brigham Young, living in a $75-a-month basement apartment. After he graduated, the couple moved to Boston so that he could attend Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Slowed down by parenthood, she later finished her undergraduate work (for which she was a semester and half's worth of credits short) by taking night courses at Harvard Extension School, from which she graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in French language.
A stay-at-home mom, Romney raised the family's five boys (born between 1970 and 1981) and taught early morning scripture classes to them and other children while her husband pursued his career, first in business and then in politics. Her personality as a political wife was viewed as superficial and was a detrimental factor in her husband's eventually losing effort in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

Multiple sclerosis and riding
During 1997, Ann Romney began experiencing severe numbness, fatigue, and other symptoms, and just before Thanksgiving in 1998, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Mitt Romney described watching her fail a series of neurological tests as the worst day of his life. He later said: "I couldn't operate without Ann. We're a partnership. We've always been a partnership so her being healthy and our being able to be together is essential. She initially experienced a period of severe difficulty with the disease, and later said: "I was very sick in 1998 when I was diagnosed. I was pretty desperate, pretty frightened and very, very sick. It was tough at the beginning, just to think, this is how I'm going to feel for the rest of my life. Since then, a mixture of mainstream and alternative treatments has given her a lifestyle mostly without limitations. She initially used corticosteroids, including intravenously, and credited them with helping stop the progression of the disease. She then dropped them and other medications due to counterproductive side effects. She has partaken of reflexology, acupuncture, and craniosacral therapy, and has said, "There is huge merit in both Eastern and Western medicine, and I've taken a little bit from both." She is a board member for the New England chapter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and has been given the MS Society's Annual Hope Award.
Romney is an avid equestrian, crediting her renewed involvement in it while in Park City, Utah (where the couple had built a vacation home and where they lived when he was in charge of the 2002 Winter Olympic Games) for much of her recovery after her multiple sclerosis diagnosis and for her continued ability to deal with the disease. She has received recognition in dressage as an adult amateur at the national level, including earning her 2006 Gold Medal and 2005 Silver Medal at the Grand Prix level from the United States Dressage Federation. She also sometimes competes in professional dressage events and has broken the 60% level at Grand Prix. Romney works with California trainer Jan Ebling, who schools her and her horses in dressage and works with her importing new stock from Europe. The pair qualified for the Pan-Am games in 2004.

Early life
Born Ann Lois Davies, she was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, by parents Edward R. Davies and Lois Davies. Her father, originally from Wales, was a self-made businessman who became president of Jered Industries, a maker of heavy machinery for marine use. He was also mayor of Bloomfield Hills. Raised in the Welsh Congregationalists, he had become strongly opposed to all organized religion,although on her request the family very occasionally attended church, and she nominally identified as an Episcopalian.
Ann Davies knew of Mitt Romney since elementary school. She went to the private Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, which was the sister school to the all-boys Cranbrook School that he attended. The two were re-introduced and began dating in March 1965; they informally agreed to marriage after his senior prom in June 1965.
While he was attending Stanford University for a year and then was away starting two-and-a-half years of Mormon missionary duty in France, she decided on her own to convert to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints during 1966. In doing so she accepted the guidance of Mitt's father George Romney, the Governor of Michigan. She graduated from high school in 1967 and began attending Brigham Young University (BYU). She also spent a semester at the University of Grenoble in France during her freshman year. The Mormon missionary rules only allowed her two brief visits with Mitt and very rare telephone calls with him. While at BYU she dated and developed strong feelings for future business academic Kim Cameron, while Mitt implored her to wait for his return.

Marriage and children
Immediately upon the missionary's return from France in December 1968, the pair reconnected and agreed to get married as soon as possible. Ann Davies and Mitt Romney were married by an church elder in a civil ceremony on March 21, 1969, at her Bloomfield Hills home, with a reception afterward at a local country club. The following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony inside the Salt Lake Temple; her family could not attend since they were non-Mormons, but were present at a subsequent wedding breakfast held for them across the street.
The couple's first son was born in 1970 while both were undergraduates at Brigham Young, living in a $75-a-month basement apartment. After he graduated, the couple moved to Boston so that he could attend Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School. Slowed down by parenthood, she later finished her undergraduate work (for which she was a semester and half's worth of credits short) by taking night courses at Harvard Extension School, from which she graduated in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree with a concentration in French language.
A stay-at-home mom, Romney raised the family's five boys (born between 1970 and 1981) and taught early morning scripture classes to them and other children while her husband pursued his career, first in business and then in politics. Her personality as a political wife was viewed as superficial and was a detrimental factor in her husband's eventually losing effort in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts.

Willard Mitt Romney

Willard Mitt Romney, born March 12, 1947 is an American businessman and Republican political figure who was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts (2003 to 2007). He ran for President of the United States in the 2008 election, and is exploring a possible candidacy in the 2012 presidential election.
Romney is the son of George W. Romney (the former Governor of Michigan) and Lenore Romney. He was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and served as a Mormon missionary in France. He received his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University, then earned joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration degrees from Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Romney entered the management consulting business which led to a position at Bain & Company, eventually serving as its CEO to lead it out of crisis. He was also co-founder and head of the spin-off company Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm which became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts but lost to incumbent Ted Kennedy. Romney organized and steered the 2002 Winter Olympics as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee, and helped turn the troubled Games into a financial success.
Romney won the election for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002, but did not seek reelection in 2006. During his term, he presided over a series of spending cuts and increases in fees while the state's finances improved. He signed into law the landmark Massachusetts health care reform legislation, which provided near-universal health insurance access via subsidies and state-level mandates. During the course of his political career, his positions or rhetorical emphasis shifted more towards American conservatism in several areas, though his stances on many other issues have been consistent; this process continued with Romney becoming a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In that contest, he won several caucus and primary contests, but ultimately lost to John McCain. Since then he has published a book, No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, and also given speeches and raised campaign funds on behalf of fellow Republicans.
On April 11, 2011, Romney announced that he had started an exploratory committee for a presidential campaign, and on June 2, 2011, he officially announced that he would run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination; political observers and public opinion polls place him as a front-runner for the nomination.

Early life
Romney was born in Detroit, Michigan. He is the youngest child of George W. Romney, a man of humble upbringing who by 1948 had become an automobile executive, and Lenore Romney (née LaFount). His mother was a native of Logan, Utah and his father had been born in Mexico to American parents. The three siblings before him were Margo Lynn, Jane LaFount, and G. Scott, followed by Mitt after a gap of six years. Romney was named after hotel magnate J. Willard Marriott, his father's best friend, and his father's cousin Milton "Mitt" Romney, 1925–1929 quarterback for the Chicago Bears.
When Mitt was five, the family moved from Detroit to the affluent suburb of Bloomfield Hills. His father became CEO of American Motors and turned the company around from the brink of bankruptcy; by the time Mitt was twelve, his father had become a nationally known figure in print and on television. Mitt idolized him, read automotive trade magazines and kept abreast of automotive developments, and aspired to be an executive in the industry himself one day. His father also presided over the Detroit Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to which the family belonged.

Mitt went to public elementary schools and then from seventh grade on, attended Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, a private boys preparatory school of the classic mold where he was the lone Mormon and where many students came from even more privileged backgrounds. He was not particularly athletic and at first did not excel at academics. While a sophomore, Mitt participated in the campaign in which his father was elected Governor of Michigan. George Romney was re-elected twice; Mitt worked for him as an intern in the governor's office, and was present at the 1964 Republican National Convention when his moderate father battled conservative party nominee Barry Goldwater over issues of civil rights and ideological extremism. Mitt did not flaunt the connection with his father to his friends nor trade in on his name to gain advantages for himself. Mitt had a steady set of chores and worked summer jobs, including being a security guard at a Chrysler plant.
Initially a manager for the ice hockey team and a pep squad member, during his final year at Cranbook, Romney joined the cross country running team and improved academically, but was still not a star pupil. His social skills were strong, however, and he won an award for those "whose contributions to school life are often not fully recognized through already existing channels. Romney enjoyed partying and was known as a kinetic kid who loved to pull off non-malicious pranks. In March of his senior year, he began dating Ann Davies, two years behind him, whom he had once known in elementary school; she attended the private Kingswood School, the sister school to Cranbrook. The two informally agreed to marriage around the time of his June 1965 graduation.

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  • Marriage and family life of Mitt Romney

    Romney attended Stanford University for a year. Although the campus was becoming radicalized with the beginnings of 1960s social and political movements, he kept a clean-cut appearance and enjoyed traditional campus events. In May 1966, he was part of a counter-protest against a group staging a sit-in in the university administration building in opposition to draft status tests.
    In July 1966, Romney left for 30 months in France as a Mormon missionary, a traditional duty that his father and other relatives had done before him. He arrived in Le Havre with ideas about how to change and promote the French Mission, while facing physical and economic deprivation for the first time in his life in their cramped quarters. Rules against drinking, smoking, and dating were strictly enforced. Like most Mormon missionaries, he failed to gain many converts, with the nominally Catholic but secular, wine-loving French people proving especially resistant to a religion that prohibits alcohol. He became demoralized, and later recalled it as the only time in his life when "most of what I was trying to do was rejected. In Nantes, Romney suffered a badly bruised jaw in defending two female missionaries against a horde of local rugby players. He continued to work hard, however; having grown up in Michigan rather than the more insular Utah world, Romney was better able to interact with the local population. He was promoted to zone leader in Bordeaux in early 1968 and subsequently became assistant to the mission president in Paris, the highest position a missionary could assume. Romney's hawkish views about the Vietnam War were only reinforced when the French greeted him with hostility over his country's role in it and he debated them in return. He also witnessed first-hand the May 1968 general strike and student uprisings.
    In June 1968, an automobile Romney was driving was involved in a collision in southern France that seriously injured him and killed one of his passengers, the wife of the mission president. Fault for the accident was attributed completely to the driver of the other vehicle. After recovering, Romney became co-acting president of a mission demoralized and disorganized by the May civil disturbances and the car accident. Romney rallied and motivated the others and they met an ambitious goal of performing 200 baptisms for the year, the highest mark for the mission in a decade. By the end of his stint in December 1968, Romney was overseeing the work of 175 fellow members. The accident and the overall missionary experience changed Romney, giving him an appreciation for the fragility of life and the need for a seriousness of purpose, and a capacity for organization and a record of success, that he had theretofore lacked. It also represented a crucible, after having been only a half-hearted Mormon growing up: "On a mission, your faith in Jesus Christ either evaporates or it becomes much deeper. For me it became much deeper.
    While he was away, Ann Davies had converted to the LDS Church, guided by George Romney, and had begun attending Brigham Young University. Mitt was nervous that she had been wooed by others while he was away, and indeed she had dated others, but at their first meeting following his return they reconnected and agreed to get married quickly. That happened on March 21, 1969, in a Bloomfield Hills civil ceremony presided over by a church elder; the following day the couple flew to Utah for a wedding ceremony at the Salt Lake Temple.
    Romney began attending Brigham Young too. He had missed much of the tumultuous American anti-Vietnam War movement while away, and was surprised to learn that his father had turned against the war during his ill-fated 1968 presidential campaign. Regarding the military draft, Romney had initially gotten a student deferment, then like most other Mormon missionaries had received a ministerial deferment while in France, then got another student deferment. When those ran out, his high number in the December 1969 draft lottery (300) meant he would not be selected.
    At culturally conservative Brigham Young, Romney continued to be sheltered from much of the upheaval of the era, and did not join the few protests against the war or the LDS Church's policy against giving full membership to blacks. He became president and successful fundraiser for the all-male Cougar Club and showed a new-found discipline in his studies. In his senior year he took leave to work as driver and advance man for his mother Lenore Romney's eventually unsuccessful 1970 campaign for U.S. Senator from Michigan. He graduated from Brigham Young in 1971, earning a Bachelor of Arts in English and giving commencement addresses to both his own College of Humanities and to the whole university.
    The Romneys' first son, Tagg, was born in 1970 while both were undergraduates at Brigham Young and living in a basement apartment. They subsequently had Matt (1971), Josh (1975), Ben (1978), and Craig. Ann Romney's work as a stay-at-home mom would enable her husband to pursue his career.
    Romney still wanted to pursue a business path, but his father, by now serving in President Richard Nixon's cabinet as U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, advised that a law degree would be valuable. Thus Romney became one of only 15 students to enroll at the recently created joint Juris Doctor/Master of Business Administration four-year program coordinated between Harvard Law School and Harvard Business School. Fellow students noted Romney's strong work ethic and buttoned-down appearance; he lived in a Belmont, Massachusetts house with Ann and by now two children. He graduated in 1975 cum laude from the law school, representing a standing in the top third of that class, and was named a Baker Scholar for graduating in the top five percent of his business school class.



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    Romney's 1994 U.S. senatorial campaign

    Romney had been thinking about entering politics for a while. He decided to take on longtime incumbent Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, who was more vulnerable than usual in 1994 – in part because of the unpopularity of the Democratic Congress as a whole and also because this was Kennedy's first election since the William Kennedy Smith trial in Florida, in which Kennedy had taken some public relations hits regarding his character. Romney changed his affiliation from Independent to Republican in October 1993 and formally announced his candidacy in February 1994. He stepped down from his position at Bain Capital during the run.
    Romney came from behind to win the Massachusetts Republican Party's nomination for U.S. Senate after buying substantial television time to get out his message, gaining overwhelming support in the state party convention, and then defeating businessman John Lakian in the September 1994 primary with over 80 percent of the vote. In the general election, Kennedy faced the first serious re-election challenger of his career in the young, telegenic, and very well-funded Romney. Romney ran as a fresh face, as a successful entrepreneur who stated he had created ten thousand jobs, and as a Washington outsider with a strong family image and moderate stands on social issues. Romney stated: "Ultimately, this is a campaign about change. After two decades out of public view, his father George re-emerged during the campaign as well.
    Romney's campaign was effective in portraying Kennedy as soft on crime, but had trouble establishing its own positions in a consistent manner. By mid-September 1994, polls showed the race to be approximately even. Kennedy responded with a series of attack ads, which focused both on Romney's seemingly shifting political views on issues such as abortion and on the treatment of workers at a paper products plant owned by Romney's Bain Capital. Kennedy and Romney held a widely watched late October debate without a clear winner, but by then Kennedy had pulled ahead in polls and stayed ahead afterward. Romney spent over $7 million of his own money, with Kennedy spending more than $10 million from his campaign fund, mostly in the last weeks of the campaign (this was the second-most expensive race of the 1994 election cycle, after the Dianne Feinstein–Michael Huffington Senate race in California).
    In the November general election, despite a disastrous showing for Democrats overall, Kennedy won the election with 58 percent of the vote to Romney's 41 percent,the smallest margin in Kennedy's eight re-election campaigns for the Senate.

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  • Electoral history of Mitt Romney

    Electoral history of Mitt Romney, the 70th Governor of Massachusetts (2003-2007) and a candidate for the United States Senate in 1994 and President of the United States in 2008.

    Republican primary for the United States Senate from Massachusetts, 1994:
    Mitt Romney - 188,280 (82.04%)
    John R. Lakian - 40,898 (17.82%)
    Others (write-in) - 318 (0.14%)
    United States Senate election in Massachusetts, 1994:
    Edward M. Kennedy (D) (inc.) - 1,265,997 (58.08%)
    Mitt Romney (R) - 894,000 (41.01%)
    Lauraleigh Dozier (Libertarian) - 14,484 (0.66%)
    William A. Ferguson, Jr. (LaRouche Movement) - 4,776 (0.22%)
    Others - 688 (0.03%)
    Republican primary for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election, 2002:
    Mitt Romney – unopposed
    Massachusetts gubernatorial election, 2002:
    Mitt Romney (R) - 1,091,988 (49.77%)
    Shannon P. O'Brien (D) - 985,981 (44.94%)
    Jill E. Stein (Green) - 76,530 (3.49%)
    Carla Howell (Libertarian) - 23,044 (1.05%)
    Barbara Johnson (I) - 15,335 (0.70%)
    Others - 1,301 (0.06%)


    2008 Republican presidential primaries (total popular vote):
    John McCain - 9,787,238 (46.56%)
    Mitt Romney - 4,662,443 (22.18%)
    Mike Huckabee - 4,267,267 (20.30%)
    Ron Paul - 1,179,004 (5.61%)
    Rudy Giulani - 597,624 (2.84%)
    Fred Thompson - 294,100 (1.40%)
    Uncommitted - 70,348 (0.34%)
    Alan Keyes - 59,718 (0.28%)
    Duncan Hunter - 39,928 (0.19%)
    Scattering - 39,301 (0.19%)
    Tom Tancredo - 8,612 (0.04%)
    John Cox - 3,351 (0.02%)
    Sam Brownback - 2,838 (0.01%)
    2008 Republican National Convention (presidential ballot delegate tally):
    John McCain - 2,343 (99.28%)
    Ron Paul - 15 (0.64%)
    Mitt Romney - 2 (0.09%)

    Mitt Romney presidential campaign, 2008

    Romney formally announced his candidacy for the 2008 Republican nomination for president on February 13, 2007, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. In his speech, Romney frequently invoked his father and his own family and stressed experiences in the private, public, and voluntary sectors that had brought him to this point. He said, "Throughout my life, I have pursued innovation and transformation," and casting himself as a political outsider, said, "I do not believe Washington can be transformed from within by a lifelong politician."


    Romney holding an "Ask Mitt Anything" session in Ames, Iowa, in May 2007
    The assets that Romney's campaign began with included his résumé of success in the business world and his rescuing of the Salt Lake Olympics, which matched the commonly held notion that American industry had star players who could straighten out what was wrong in the nation's capital. Romney also had solid political experience as governor together with a political pedigree courtesy of his father, a strong work ethic and energy level, and a large, wholesome-looking family that seemed so perfect as to be off-putting to some voters. Ann Romney, who had become an outspoken advocate for those with multiple sclerosis, was in remission and would be an active participant in his campaign, helping to soften his image.Moreover, with his square jaw, handsome face, white teeth, and full head of dark hair graying slightly at the temples, Mitt Romney looked like a president. Romney's liabilities included having run for senator and served as governor in one of the nation's most liberal states, having taken some positions there that were opposed by the party's conservative base, and subsequently shifting those positions. The candidate's Mormon religion was also viewed with suspicion and skepticism by some in the Evangelical portion of the party; polls indicated that about a quarter of Republican voters, and a quarter of voters overall, said they were less likely to vote for a candidate who was a Mormon.
    Romney assembled for his campaign a veteran group of Republican staffers, consultants, and pollsters. He was little-known nationally, though, and stayed around the 10 percent range in Republican preference polls for the first half of 2007. Romney's strategy was to win the first two big contests, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, and carry the momentum and visibility gained through the big Super Tuesday primaries and on to the nomination. He proved the most effective fundraiser of any of the Republican candidates, with his Olympics ties helping him with fundraising from Utah residents and from sponsors and trustees of the games. He also partly financed his campaign with his own personal fortune. These resources, combined with his August 2007 win in the Iowa Straw Poll and the mid-year near-collapse of nominal front-runner John McCain's campaign, made Romney a threat to win the nomination and the focus of the other candidates' attacks. Romney's staff suffered from internal strife and the candidate himself was indecisive at times, constantly asking for more data before making a decision. Persistent questions about the role of religion in Romney's life, as well as Southern Baptist minister and former Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee's rise in the polls based upon an explicitly Christian-themed campaign, led to the December 6, 2007, "Faith in America" speech. In it, Romney said he should neither be elected nor rejected based upon his religion, and echoed Senator's John F. Kennedy's famous speech during his 1960 presidential campaign in saying "I will put no doctrine of any church above the plain duties of the office and the sovereign authority of the law. Romney largely avoided discussing the specific tenets of his faith, instead stressing that he would be informed by it and that, "Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

    In the January 3, 2008, Iowa Republican caucuses, the first contest of the primary season, Romney received 25 percent of the vote and placed second to the vastly outspent Huckabee, who received 34 percent. Of the 60 percent of caucus-goers who were evangelical Christians, Huckabee was supported by about half of them while Romney by only a fifth. A couple of days later, Romney won the lightly contested Wyoming Republican caucuses. At a Saint Anselm College debate, Huckabee and McCain pounded away at Romney's image as a flip flopper. Indeed, this label would stick to Romney through the campaign (but was one that Romney rejected as unfair and inaccurate, except for his acknowledged change of mind on abortion). Romney seemed to approach the campaign as a management consulting exercise, and showed a lack of personal warmth and political feel; journalist Evan Thomas wrote that Romney "came off as a phony, even when he was perfectly sincere." Romney's staff would conclude that competing as a candidate of social conservatism and ideological purity rather than of pragmatic competence had been a mistake.
    Romney finished in second place by five percentage points to the resurgent McCain in the next-door-to-his-home-state New Hampshire primary on January 8. Romney rebounded to win the January 15 Michigan primary over McCain by a solid margin, capitalizing on his childhood ties to the state and his vow to bring back lost automotive industry jobs which was seen by several commentators as unrealistic. On January 19, Romney won the lightly contested Nevada caucuses, but placed fourth in the intense South Carolina primary, where he had effectively ceded the contest to his rivals. McCain gained further momentum with his win in South Carolina, leading to a showdown between him and Romney in the Florida primary.

    For ten days, Romney campaigned intensively on economic issues and the burgeoning subprime mortgage crisis, while McCain repeatedly and inaccurately asserted that Romney favored a premature withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. McCain won key last-minute endorsements from Florida Senator Mel Martinez and Governor Charlie Crist, which helped push him to a five percentage point victory on January 29. Although many Republican officials were now lining up behind McCain,Romney persisted through the nationwide Super Tuesday contests on February 5. There he won primaries or caucuses in several states, including Massachusetts, Alaska, Minnesota, Colorado and Utah, but McCain won more, including large states such as California and New York. Trailing McCain in delegates by a more than two-to-one margin, Romney announced the end of his campaign on February 7 during a speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.
    Altogether, Romney had won 11 primaries and caucuses, received about 4.7 million total votes, and garnered about 280 delegates. Romney spent $110 million during the campaign, including $45 million of his own money.
    Romney endorsed McCain for president a week later. He soon founded the Free and Strong America PAC, a political action committee whose stated mission was to raise money for other Republican candidates and to promote Republican policies. Romney became one of the McCain campaign's most visible surrogates, appearing on behalf of the GOP nominee at fundraisers, state Republican party conventions, and on cable news programs. His efforts earned McCain's respect and the two developed a warmer relationship; he was on the nominee's short list for the vice presidential running mate slot, where his experience in matters economic would have balanced one of McCain's weaknesses. McCain, behind in the polls, opted instead for a high-risk, high-reward "game changer" and selected Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin. Romney continued to work for McCain's eventually unsuccessful general election campaign.



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