I’ve never understood Mitt Romney. I’ve admired him, even warmed to him. The post-election documentary Mitt presents Mitt Romney as a man who is high in conscientiousness; he chases after the tiniest litter in his presence. It shows a winning self-effacing side of the man; it shows him admiring his father more than himself. In that film, he takes the slings and arrows of public life with some grace. He’s been on the right side of various controversies in his Church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was, by everyone’s accounts, a sterling business partner who worked hard and intelligently building a business in a high-stakes field.
In my own reporting on him, I’ve seen how his high energy and his chase for excellence come out in his family life. I’ve seen how he taught his sons to make difficult choices in their high-pressure and high-status jobs to prioritize time traditionally set aside for Romney family get-togethers. Just a picture of his children, their spouses, and his grandkids is a visual argument for his greatness as a man. I’ve long thought that one of his mistakes was not being more open about his faith and more candid. He’s an example of the way Mormonism seemed to be a frontier mutation of American WASP culture, one that endowed its members with a certain competitive flintiness, political realism, and actual family values where before there was merely graceful entitlement and a certain gin-blossom softness. And I’ve even admired his ambition for higher office. Having proved himself as a son, a husband, a father, and in business, he sought to serve his country in a very special way, as his father did. And he seemed to conceive of doing so as a way of demonstrating not just his gratitude for his country, but proving the worth of the subculture of it that formed him.
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