WHEN MITT Romney introduces himself to voters, he has a peculiar habit of guessing their age or nationality, often incorrectly. (A regular query: “Are you French Canadian?”)
When making small talk with locals, he peppers the conversation with curious details. (“We stayed in the Courtyard hotel last night,” he told a woman at a diner. “It’s a Leed-certified hotel.”)
And when he encounters a question he particularly dislikes, he smiles politely and behaves as if it never happened.
Romney’s bid for president this year is a carefully crafted do-over, a chance to revise and retool a campaign that quickly fizzled out four years ago. He has lost the tie, overhauled his stump speech and slimmed down his political operation.
But perhaps the trickiest part is changing who Romney is when he steps out from behind the lectern and wades into a roomful of voters: a cautious chief executive who is uneasy with off-the-cuff remarks, unnatural at chit-chat and spare with his emotions.
At coffee shops and veterans’ halls, on sidewalks and factory tours, the reinvented version, it turns out, is not all that different from the original.
A close-up study of Romney’s casual interactions with voters captures a candidate who can be efficient, funny and self-deprecating, yet often strains to connect in a personal way.
Even those who praise his style after meeting him sometimes do so in ways that feel backhanded: “I don’t mind stiff and formal,” said Holly Sirois, who spoke to Romney a few days ago at a pizza shop in Newport, New Hampshire. “I don’t want the guy sitting in the backyard drinking beers with his buddies. I want my president to act presidential.”
Romney has plenty of moments when he wins positive reactions and some when he seems to make a genuine link, undercutting his caricature as robotic. And he is hardly giving up on mastering the art of the soft sell: He personally insisted on spending more hours talking to voters this election and fewer sequestered in his Boston headquarters.
The calculation may prove crucial in a year when a procession of rivals – Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich – has roused the Republican base with colourful personalities and dynamic speaking styles.
The informal, humanising interactions are so essential to the campaign’s image that Romney has scheduled back-to-back bus tours in New Hampshire and Iowa, the latest of which began here in Davenport on Tuesday, crammed with events such as Coffee with Mitt, Pizza with Mitt and Spaghetti with Mitt.
“No one is an expert at it when they first do it,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a senior adviser to Romney, who has watched him ring hundreds of doorbells over the years. “There has been an improvement over time, just as you would expect.”
For a candidate who is exceedingly risk-averse, Romney has developed an unlikely penchant for trying to puzzle out everything from voters’ personal relationships to their ancestral homelands.
“Sisters?” he asked. (Nope, stepmother and stepdaughter). “Your husband?” he wondered. (No, just a friend from the neighbourhood.) “Mother and daughter?” he guessed. (Cousins, actually.) The results can be awkward.
“Daughter?” he asked a woman sitting with a man and two younger girls at the diner in Tilton, New Hampshire, on Friday morning. Her face turned a shade of red. “Wife.” Oh, Romney said.
“It was a compliment, I guess,” said the woman, Janealle Batchelder (31). “At the same time, it was possibly an insult.”
Countries of origin are another favourite. When a man in Bethlehem introduced himself as Randall Loiacono, Romney asked, “Now, is that a northern European name?” “Sicilian,” Loiacono said, before spelling his name at Romney’s request.
He likes to congratulate people. For what, exactly, is not always clear. “Congratulations,” he told a grandmother at a town hall meeting on Thursday night, presumably because she had a large brood. Over three days last week, he congratulated a girl who said she was attending college, a woman who owned a small business and a mother who said she was going back to school.
In Bedford, he turned to find a middle-aged man who proudly told him, “You already have my vote.” It was the kind of comment that might normally elicit an expression of gratitude or perhaps an inquiry into the voter’s background. Romney replied: “Well, that’s good.”
Few candidates are as deft at genially brushing off unwelcome queries and comments. In Bedford, a woman walked up to him after a speech and declared: “I have a lot of friends who say you are the robotic type. And I am like, no, you need to stay that way because you are a leader.”
Romney’s mouth arched into a somewhat pained smile as he rushed to conclude the conversation. “Nice to see you guys,” he said as he walked away.
A few moments later, a voter asked him whether there would be a place for Ron Paul, the Texas congressman, in a Romney White House. Romney treated the question as a joke, letting out a laugh and walking on by. “I was actually kind of serious,” the man said afterwards.
Sometimes, he will engage in a back-and-forth with tough questioners; in Concord, a woman told him she favoured socialised medicine. “I’ve got someone for you,” Romney said. “His name is Barack Obama. He agrees with you. Ha-ha.”
His fascination with arcane, technical information can occasionally leave voters scratching their heads. When he mentioned his hotel’s Leed designation – an imprimatur of energy efficiency – to a middle-aged woman in Keene, New Hampshire, she acknowledged she had no idea what it meant. “Is it something to do with being green?” she asked, after he had moved on.
But his inner wonk has at times endeared him to potential supporters, as it did at a farm supply store in Lancaster, when he began discussing the intricacies of cow milk with Jessica Hebert, an Obama voter.
Romney delved deeply into the topic, with real curiosity and a barrage of questions, after Hebert, who shows dairy cows, explained that a prize animal produces about 100lb of milk a day.
“How much milk do they produce?” he asked. “Somebody has got an iPad here. How many pounds per gallon?”
Romney began a series of rapid-fire calculations: “Eight-point-three pounds per gallon. So eight into 100 is gonna be about 13, 14, gallons. Oh, 12 – there you go.” Romney beamed with satisfaction at solving the puzzle – and Hebert said she liked what she had heard.
"That is a lot of milk," Romney said. – ( New York Times)