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Gosh, Who Talks Like That Now? Romney Does
by
Michael Barbaro and Ashley Parker
OCT. 20, 2012
GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — At a
campaign stop in Rockford, Ill., not long ago, Mitt
Romney sought to convey his
feelings for his wife, Ann. “Smitten,” he said.
Not merely in love.
“Yeah, smitten,” he said.
“Mitt was smitten.”
It was a classic Mittism, as
friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential
candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they
“disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail,
they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.
As he seeks the office of
commander in chief, Mr. Romney can sometimes seem like an editor in chief,
employing a language all his own. It is polite, formal and at times
anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who frequently struggles to
sell himself to the American electorate.
It is most pronounced when he
is on the stump and off the cuff, not on the stuffy and rehearsed debate stage.
But Mr. Romney offered voters a dose of it during his face-off with President
Obama last week, when he coined the infelicitous phrase “binders full of
women.”
Mr. Romney’s unique style of
speaking has distinguished him throughout his career, influencing the word
choices of those who work with and especially for him. Should he reach the
White House, friends and advisers concede, the trait could be a defining
feature of his public image, as memorable as Lyndon B. Johnson’s foul-mouthed
utterances or the first President Bush’s tortured syntax.
Mr. Romney, 65, has spent
four decades inside the corridors of high finance and state politics, where
indecorous diction and vulgarisms abound. But he has emerged as if in a
rhetorical time capsule from a well-mannered era of soda fountains and AMC
Ramblers, someone whose idea of swearing is to let loose with the phrase
“H-E-double hockey sticks.”
“He actually said that,”
recalled Thomas Finneran, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of
Representatives when Mr. Romney was governor. “As in, go to ‘H-E-double hockey
sticks.’ I would think to myself, ‘Who talks like that?’ ”
Mr. Romney, quite proudly. In
fact, he seems puzzled by the fascination with something as instinctive (and
immutable) as how he talks, as if somebody were asking how he breathes. “It’s like
someone who speaks with an accent,” he said in an interview. “You don’t hear
the accent.”
His Mormon faith frowns on
salty language, and so does he. A man of relentless self-discipline, he made
clear to lawmakers in Boston
and colleagues in business that even in matters of vocabulary, he “held himself
to a high standard of behavior,” said Geoffrey Rehnert, a former executive at
Bain Capital, the firm Mr. Romney started in the 1980s. Mr. Romney’s father,
George, whom he idolized, shared the same style of refined and restrained
speech.
Those around him are so
accustomed to his verbal tics that they describe them in shorthand.
“Old-timey,” said one aide. “His 1950s language,” explained another. “The Gomer
Pyle routine,” said a third.
Asked about his boss’s word
preferences, Eric Fehrnstrom, a veteran Romney adviser, responded knowingly:
“You mean like ‘gosh, golly, darn’?”
For Democratic strategists,
Mr. Romney’s throwback vocabulary feeds into their portrayal of a man
ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the modern age. David Axelrod, a
top adviser for an Obama campaign that has adopted “Forward” as its slogan,
once quipped that Mr. Romney “must watch ‘Mad Men,’ ” the hit television
show set in Manhattan in the 1960s, “and think it’s the evening news.”
His exclamations can sound
jarring to the contemporary ear — or charming, depending on whom you ask.
Midway into a critique of Mr. Obama’s economic policies a few months ago, Mr.
Romney declared: “They’ve scared the dickens out of banks,” he said. “They’ve
scared the dickens out of insurance companies.”
He declared, “To heck with
it!” while urging reporters to use their fingers to dig into a box of pastries
he was passing around on a plane. “Darn good question,” he replied to a voter
in Kalamazoo, Mich., who asked how he would work with
Congress if elected. (His wife also got the “darn” treatment in Michigan, when he
enthused, “Gosh, darn, she is amazing!”) “Thank heavens” is another favorite.
For people used to peppering
their speech with four-letter words, time with Mr. Romney can prove an exercise
in self-control. A half-dozen people recalled the precise moment when they
swore — almost always accidentally — in his presence.
When Robert Travaglini, then
the Democratic president of the Massachusetts State Senate, would curse in
front of Mr. Romney, the governor would frown and interject, “Well, I wouldn’t
choose that diction,” Mr. Travaglini recalled.
Mr. Rehnert, the former Bain
executive, was mortified when a potential client he took into Mr. Romney’s
office promptly dropped a string of profanities. “Mitt wanted to know what cats
and dogs I was dragging in here,” Mr. Rehnert said.
His cussing colleagues said
Mr. Romney took pains not to judge them publicly. “He did not impose his
language preferences on us,” Mr. Finneran said. “But I wonder if we became a
little bit more restrained because we knew this about him.”
Mr. Travaglini recalled
lawmakers’ discussing how Mr. Romney “should be more in tune with the
vernacular of the day and express himself more passionately.”
“But,” he added, “that’s not
who he is.”
Mr. Romney does have his own
distinctly G-rated arsenal of angry expressions — “Good grief,” “flippin’,”
“good heavens” and even the occasional “crap.”
Perhaps the most intriguing
of these is “grunt.” Most people just grunt. Mr. Romney, however, talks about
grunting. “Grunt” he says, onomatopoetically, when annoyed with a last-minute
change in his campaign schedule.
Many of Mr. Romney’s verbal
habits can sound like those of a hyper-literate graduate student who never left
school. (In college, he majored in English.) He favors the gentlemanly
qualifier “if you will,” which he invoked three times during a recent speech.
On how to reduce the debt:
“You have to start accumulating, if you will, reserves.”
On speaking to a group of
soldiers: “The cadets were all lined up and sitting at attention, if you will.”
On his business background:
“I’ve had the experience of working in the real world, if you will.”
In interviews, voters
expressed an equal measure of admiration for and curiosity about his quaint
dialect, which many described as a conspicuous break from the normally harsh
tone of politicians.
“It’s a wonderful change,”
said Irene Sperling, a retiree from Allentown,
Pa. “He’s a gentleman.”
Wendy Tonn, 63, a Romney supporter who splits her time
between Michigan and Florida, said she found comfort in his vocabulary,
comparing it to the simple innocence of “Leave It to Beaver.” “We are of that
era, and we’d like to be returned to that kind of era,” she said. [emphasis
added]
Even Dennis Miller, the
comedian, has weighed in, suggesting that after four years of having a “hipster
president” in the White House, Americans craved a “gosh president.”
A few acquaintances have
tried to drag him linguistically into the 21st century. Mr. Finneran, an
admitted serial curser, said that after years of working closely with Mr.
Romney, he began to fantasize about provoking him to utter a particularly crude
word.
“It got to the point where I
started to think that my greatest achievement of all time would be if I somehow
or other got him to say the word,” he said.
Once, Mr. Romney seemed on
the cusp of fulfilling that wish during a heated discussion. But he caught
himself. “And I thought, ‘Oh, God, my closest moment ever,’ ” Mr. Finneran
said. “But it’s not going to happen.”
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